Benefits of Tissue Culture in Crop Improvement

Unlike any technique in horticulture, plant tissue culture has its pros and cons. In fact, the number of advantages are more than the disadvantages.

One can discuss this approach at length and name such advantages as:

• To conserve endangered or critically endangered species.
• To achieve rapid production of plants irrespective of their seasons.
• For haploid production.
• To produce disease-free plants.
• To shorten the dormancy period of seeds.
• To conserve the germplasm of several plants.
• For genetic transformation.
• To produce varieties that are tolerant to salinity, drought, and heat stresses.

Genetic engineering is an ongoing and rapidly expanding field. This technique consists of a group of advanced techniques, which include molecular genetics, recombinant DNA studies, genome characterization, gene-transfer techniques, aseptic growth of cells, tissues, organs, and in vitro regeneration of plants.

These technologies have applications in crop improvement and agriculture, which is the focus of this article.

1. Wide Hybridization

The process of gene transfer between two plants that lead to the formation of the embryo can be blocked at any stage due to multiple factors.

These functional barriers are categorized into two groups:

A. Pre-Zygotic Barrier

B. Post-Zygotic Barrier

These barriers can be overcome using in vitro fertilization techniques, embryo or ovule culture, or protoplast fusion.

2. In-vitro Fertilization

In vitro fertilization is an important technique used in genetics and plant breeding. It is a simple laboratory procedure that facilitates both interspecific or intraspecific genetic cross. It helps in overcoming physiological incompatibility that occurs during hybrid formation.

3. Embryo Culture

Embryo culture (EC) is a technique used to overcome problems in embryo growth and development. It is also used to induce embryo growth in the absence of a symbiotic partner, or to produce monoploids of barley. Some of r the application of this technique are:

• The embryo rescue technique was used to reduce the breeding cycle of Iris from 2 to 3 years to a few months.
• The technique was used to introduce interspecific and intergeneric hybrids of many crops including, cotton, barley, tomato, rice, jute, Hordeum X Secale, Triticum X Secale, Tripsacm x Zea, and some Brassicas.
• This technique is useful in producing hybrid wheat.

4. Protoplast Fusion

The best way to produce a hybrid of plants is by using Protoplast fusion. This technique is especially useful when the plant species involved are difficult to cross using conventional techniques. Some cases in which Protoplast fusion has been used are discussed below:

A. In Nicotiana or tobacco plants, the technique was used to modify the alkaloid and disease-resistant traits of commercial tobacco cultivars. The hybrids of Nicotiana produced using the technique have also been found to be resistant to root-knot nematodes and spider mites.

B. The technique has also been found to be useful in producing somatic hybrids of plants like Brassicas, citrus, rice, carrot, canola, tomato, and the forage legumes alfalfa and clover.

5. Haploid Production

Haploid production methods have long been used to create homozygous breeding lines with high efficiency, but they can be difficult and expensive to perform. The three currently used methods are:

A. Culture of excised ovaries and ovules.

B. The bulbosum technique of embryo culture.

C. Culture of excised anthers and pollen.

Plant scientists have been able to use microspore and anther culture to produce haploids of at least 171 species of plants. These include cereals, forage crops, fruits, medicinal plants, ornamentals, oilseeds, trees, plantation crops, and vegetable crops.

6. Soma clonal Variation

After a certain amount of time, cells in a plant start to die and stop dividing. Soma clonal variation is the result of several events including environmental, genetic, epigenetic, and tissue culture-induced variability.

Tissue culture has also been an essential tool to induce soma clonal variation. It reflects the pre-existing cellular genetic differences or tissue culture-induced variability.

A. Some of the well-known reasons for variation include

B. several types of nuclear chromosomal re-arrangements and losses

C. gene amplification or de-amplification

D. non-reciprocal mitotic recombination events transposable element activation

E. Apparent point mutations, or re-activation of silent genes in multigene families, and

F. Alterations in maternally inherited characteristics.

Crop genetic engineering has introduced a number of profound changes in agricultural crops, including alterations in:

Plant pigmentation ; Seed yield ; Plant vigor and size & Leaf and flower morphology

Disease tolerance or resistance in many crops, including wheat, triticale, rice, oats, maize, sugar cane, alfalfa, tobacco, tomato, potato, oilseed rape, and celery.

These variations are obtained from somatic cells and gametic tissues.

7. Propagation of Plants

Micropropagation is a popular technique for mass-producing plants on a commercial scale.

The technique has been popular for more than 30 years in labs and industries for the production of plants for different purposes.

The most common technique is to enhance axillary bud breaking, but bioreactors are another approach being used in industrial areas.

Limitations :

A. Process is not cheap and not all plant species are amenable to tissue culture

B. Cost of the labor and maintenance of asepsis

C. Vitrification, acclimatization, and contamination problems can cause a huge loss of money and time in the process

D. variations because of polyploidy, aneuploidy, and mutations result in loss of desirable economic traits in the tissue-cultured products.

8. Synthetic Seeds

A synthetic seed is a somatic embryo encapsulated inside a coating. It’s of different types which include:

A. Somatic embryos encapsulated in a water gel.

B. Dried and coated somatic embryos.

C. Somatic embryos are suspended in a fluid carrier.

D. Shoot buds encapsulated in a water gel.

Synthetic seed technology has been tried on crops like celery and lettuce. Synthetic seeds have several applications in agriculture, which include:

A. It’s an improvement to the traditional method of propagation.

B. It has been used for the maintenance of male-sterile lines.

C. It has been used for the maintenance of parental lines for hybrid crop production.

D. It has application in the preservation and multiplication of elite genotypes of woody plants that have long juvenile developmental phases.

9. Pathogen Eradication

One of the most efficient techniques for preventing and removing pathogens from crops is tissue culture.

This technique has been used on a large scale in places like Chile and Indonesia, where it has increased crop yields to 150% and has improved the quality of harvested crops.

Tissue culture involves growing plant cells in sterile conditions to stop the spread of pathogens. Meristem tissue culture involves taking stem cells from a plant and growing them in a nutrition solution to promote growth.

The excision and culture of apical meristems (the meristem with one to three of the subjacent leaf primordia), coupled with thermo- or chemo-therapy, is a successful method to produce virus-free or pathogen-free material for micropropagation.

10. Germplasm Preservation

Plant biologists are facing a growing problem: in vitro storage of plant genetics.

The problem is that when they grow plants in their labs, they can’t store the samples for very long before they stop growing and die. This means they need to constantly grow new versions of the plant and throw the old ones out before they get moldy.

The plant biologists have responded by trying to figure out how to preserve the plant genetics without having to keep them alive forever. This means doing things like putting them at low temperature and/or with growth-retarding compounds in a medium (the stuff inside the tubes) or cryopreserving them or as desiccated synthetic seed.

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