Plant tissue culture, also called micropropogation, is a practice used to propagate plants under sterile conditions, often to produce clones of a plant. Different techniques in plant tissue culture may offer certain advantages over traditional methods of propagation, including:

• The production of exact copies of plants that produce particularly good flowers, fruits, or have other desirable traits.
• To quickly produce mature plants.
• The production of multiples of plants in the absence of seeds or necessary pollinators to produce seeds.
• The regeneration of whole plants from plant cells that have been genetically modified.
• The production of plants in sterile containers that allows them to be moved with greatly reduced chances of transmitting diseases, pests, and pathogens.
• The production of plants from seeds that otherwise have very low chances of germinating and growing, i.e.: orchids and nepenthes.

Plant tissue culture relies on the fact that all plant cells have the ability to generate a whole plant (totipotency). Single cells (protoplasts), pieces of leaves, or roots can often be used to generate a new plant on culture media given the required nutrients and plant hormones.

Applications

Plant tissue culture is used in widely in plant science it also has a number of commercial applications. Applications include:

• Micropropagation using to produce large numbers of identical individuals, micropropagation is widely used in forestry and in floriculture. Micropropagation can also be used in to conserve rare or endangered plant species.
• A plant breeder may use tissue culture to screen cells, rather than plants for advantageous characters, e.g herbicide resistance/tolerance.
• Large-scale growth of plant cells in liquid culture in bioreactors as a source of secondary products, like biopharmaceuticals
• To cross distantly related species by protoplast fusion and regeneration of the novel hybrid .
• For production of dihaploid plants from haploid cultures to achieve homozygous lines more rapidly in breeding programmes, usually by treatemnt with colchicine which causes doubling of the chromosome number.
• As a tissue for transformation, followed by either short-term testing of genetic constructs or regeneration of transgenic plants
• Certain techniques may be employed that can be used to produce clean plant material from virused stock, such as that of potatoes

Books

There are very few non-scientific books on the subject, but Plants from Test Tubes: Introduction to Micropropagation is aimed at the novice hobbyist or professional grower looking to expand into micropropagation.