Plant Tissue Culture 101 | With Demonstration! | The 'Breaking Bad' of Houseplants!

have you ever heard the words tissue culture being thrown around but really you have no idea what people are even talking about perhaps you have heard of tissue culture but you really don't know how it's done then this is probably the video for you hello everybody glad you could make it my name is Kaylee Allen and welcome to tissue culture 101 in this video I'm going to take you through what tissue culture is why it is happening and even show you how it is done so we've got quite a lot to get through before we begin I just want to let you know that a lot of what you're gonna say in the demo today where I actually show you the tissue culture has been simplified down quite a bit it's a non-technical overview and it has not been performed in laboratory conditions so let's jump straight into it what is tissue culture tissue culture also known as micropropagation is the process whereby we take a plant and we produce clones of it on a mass scale so we're talking thousands of clones not just a little bit of chop and prop this process is known as a protocol so how popular is tissue culture well it's actually way more popular than you might be thinking when you go to big-box stores 80 to 90% of the plants in those box stores are tissue culture so that's quite a lot it's also why you can't actually find rare plants in big-box stores that said even plants of people consider to be pretty rare have also been tissue culture there in that process of being mass-produced plants such as theme on sera Thai consolation and the philodendron pink princess have both been tissue cultured that is why of course we now refer to these plants as being in high demand rather than rare there are a few others of course in tissue culture production there'll be many many more than what I'm about to mention but during my trip to Thailand very recently I found the following plants in tissue culture plants such as the philodendron white night epi premium cebu blue philodendron florida goals even philodendron fall term philodendron white wizard and even monstera epic remedies I found all of these in tissue culture on my recent trip so they are coming there's some inside scoop for you these plants are coming of course there will be many many many more plants in tissue culture that I haven't mentioned but just so you know this happens on a much wider scale than a lot of people are actually aware so how do how do we get to this point what happens with red plants when they hit the market how do you go from a plant being really really hard to get to being basically everywhere so in order to better understand how this works let's look at a brief example so let's use the philodendron pink princess in the beginning there weren't that many philodendron pink princesses on the market this is not because they were necessarily rare it was more a case if there was low demand people didn't know about the plant people didn't necessarily want the plant the plan wasn't fashionable it wasn't getting pressed no one had really heard of it what then has happened since is people started to become aware of it and the demand starts to increase over time demand is going to increase more and more and more and more and more and the prices are going to go up and up and up and up and up till you reach a point where we're currently at at the moment with food under pink princess and that is that the price is at an all-time high same with one certai consolation and we're now at the point where tissue culture is occurring in order to meet this demand once tissue culture has occurred on a huge scale and plants start filling people's homes and everybody has the plant that they've all coveted so much for so long these plants become not in as much demand because everyone has one they're not rare anymore and the price will start to plummet and the value of that plant will probably never go back up again that is it for that plant it becomes a common house plant obviously most plants are probably going to work this way most plants are probably going to follow this journey into the market so prices will peak demand will eventually be filled and you will start seeing for example a pink princess in Ikea or a big-box store within the next three years no problem okay so you might be thinking all right what's tissue culture got to do with that and the answer is tissue culture is the only way that any supplier any you know person in the industry can produce plants at this rate to meet this demand using regular methods of you know chop and prop regular propagation is nowhere near fast enough to meet the demands of the market it just cannot be done if protocol from tissue culture is successful you can clone one plant into thousands very very quickly very easily and in a very cost-effective manner the methodology used to do this is usually a trade secret for example when I show you the demo in this video of myself performing tissue culture I'm not going to divulge any of the recipes for any of you know the growth media needed to do this now you're probably thinking well why why is it secret why don't you just tell everyone so we can all work to make these plans less rare and the simple answer is it's business it's how all of these companies work each species of plant being tissue cultured even down to the type of plant probably maybe requires its own unique protocol what I mean by that so if I'm saying a monstera an open a tea party tea is to be tissue cultured and i monstera and sonya is to be Collision cultured those plants may not have the same you know recipes the same protocol it might be entirely different and to find this out takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of research and manpower so if a company happens to crack you know how this is done the last thing they're going to do is share that information so if company a you know figures out the secret to tissue culturing or bleaker which i suspect has probably happened as we speak they are not going to release that information to company b that comes along and says why don't you share this information why don't you tell us how it's done this is very similar to be honest to asking a plant shop owner where they're getting their plants from who their supplier is it's kind of the same thing because if you know one lab managed to get a hold of another labs protocol they could quite easily steal all the revenue from the lab that did the original work and steal their commercials success which of course is what nobody wants think of it as protecting a product or think of it as protecting intellectual property it kind of works the same way so okay so how do you actually tissue cultural plan what do you actually do what are the steps what generally happens is the growth material is prepared along with the plant material that is going to be used the plant materials are placed into the growing medium and all the time the plant will multiply within the medium so if you have you know a node on a monstera that you're shoving in there all the time this plant is going to start sprouting multiple shoots from this original plant material that you've placed in this medium once there is a significant amount of growth these plants are then soap cultured which basically means they are divided up so all of these shoots that have grown from this original material are separated they are then placed into new media new growth media and this process is repeated this process is repeated until the desired quantity of little plantlets are reached once this process is complete the plants are divided again and placed into new growth media this growth media is usually full of hormones chemicals that stimulate new production so they shoot production actually happens first before the root production so it shoots before roots once these roots have developed the plants are removed and then they go through a hardening process where they are basically acclimatize to our surroundings because these plants have actually been grown in lab conditions not our conditions once they hardened off of course these plants will visit a greenhouse they'll be part of and it will be grown out from tiny little plantlets from there on forth so they're now ready to be grown in regular nursery and sold on as husbands Navan so tissue culture is usually performed by you know large companies large corporations but there are a subset of people you know hobbyists that do like to try and perform tissue culture at home this process is often referred to as kitchen culture because as you may suspect a lot of this protocol is actually carried out in a kitchen environment using kitchen materials so think of it it's kind of like the breaking bad of tissue culture that's what's kind of going on in a minute it's not the easiest thing in the world because you have to fight with sterilization and keeping the environment clean but it can be done and kitchen culture is essentially what I'm going to show you now so please bear that in mind it's not in lab conditions it is basically breaking bad with house ones so for this demonstration I'm actually going to be using the monstera atom Sony inodes now why Monstar out and so now you might ask basically I own a monster or Bleecker and I am not about to screw around with really expensive plant material when I can actually experiment with the protocol on plant material that is much cheaper to find so that is why I'm actually using on Sarah I'm Sonia hi depending on the type of plant of course tissue culture can be pretty successful using different parts of the plant for some plans it might be the leaf for some plants it might be the stem for sometimes it might be the nodes it really does depend and what works well for one plant doesn't always work best for another that is why we have to spend a lot of time and research looking into this and working out what is the most efficient way to clone a plant a very quick note on sterility and just generally having sterile conditions so tissue culture the environment that we use for tissue culture and the conditions of these plants are cronin is absolutely ideal for any fungus and basically mold and the problem is mold and fungus will actually multiply quicker than any plant material in this environment control so if we get any contamination in there and any mold or fungus in there it's pretty much game over because it's gonna multiply quicker than the plant can multiply thus killing the plant material so it is so important to keep things really sterile in terms of kitchen culture that usually means a lot of alcohol spring and a lot of glove changing and a lot of wiping things down in this video however I do have a little bit of a helping hand I do actually have a laminar flow hood so that does help keep a lot of things sterile in a lot of conditions in kitchen conditions you wouldn't necessarily have one of those so I do have increased sterility that that perhaps a lot of other people might not have but of course it's know when years they're out as a lab so without further ado let's get into it as I mentioned before in this demonstration I'm using a laminar flow hood these are used in the bar trees to produce a clean flow of air that passes over the medium inside and keeps it free from any airborne contaminants such as spores and bacteria the first thing we need to do is prepare the growth medium for this I'm using m/s which is essentially a mixture containing all of the essential growing chemicals for these plants to this we add a little carbohydrate in the form of everyday sugar growth hormones and plant preservative mixture plant preservative mixture also known as ppm is antimicrobial which means it helps prevent any potential fungus and bacteria growth inside our tissue culture containers once this is mixed I'm giving the solution a quick shake in order to thoroughly mix the ingredients I'm then going to check the pH now this needs to be between 5.5 and 5.8 in order to ensure we have optimal conditions for nutrient uptake should we find that our pH isn't quite where we'd like it to be we can always add a little bit of vinegar if the solution is too alkaline or bicarbonate of soda if it's too acidic they should bring the solution to an acceptable pH that we can work with [Music] I'm checking the pH again and as you can see we've raised it just enough for it to be acceptable now that we're good to go I'm measuring around about 45 milliliters of our prepared solution into our tissue culture container to this I'm adding agar which is basically a vegetarian gelatin substitute produced from a variety of different seaweeds this basically makes the medium firm and allows the plant material to be suspended after giving this solution a little bit of a shake I'm going to boil this solution in the microwave now in laboratory conditions this would likely be done in an autoclave however this is kitchen culture and I don't have an autoclave so microwave is just going to have to do normally of course I would allow this mixture to cool and solidify on its own but for now we're gonna have to go with a little bit of a here's one I made earlier moment so here's one I made earlier okay on to the plant material so in order to prep this plant for tissue culture we need to clean and remove any debris from the plant we only need the nodes in this case so here I'm removing the leaves to help reduce any risk of contamination I'm chopping this plant into Knowles now this doesn't need to be done in the laminar flow in fact it's probably best not to as we haven't sterilized any of the plant nodes just yet this way we can keep our tissue culture area clean and contaminant free it's time to clean the nodes so I'm washing these in a solution of ten percent bleach a little bit of water and a little drop of dish soap now why dish soap you may ask basically it breaks the surface tension of the water surrounding the plant material which allows the bleach solution to penetrate all the nooks and crannies and sterilize the plant material I'm going to leave this to soak for around about 15 minutes or so I'm going to agitate it every few minutes just to make sure everything is nice and clean okay here we go it's now time to perform the actual tissue culture procedure here we are inside the laminar flow hood with everything we need to carry out this process I changed my gloves and they've been sprayed with 70% alcohol as has all of the equipment in the laminar flow that you see before you so it is all sterile I'm taking this node in my tweezers and I'm dipping it into 70 percent alcohol solution this is basically a final attempt to kill off any remaining contaminants that the cleaning solution just didn't quite get I'm now rinsing the node in Sarah water and a little bit of plant preservative mixture just to wash off any of the alcohol any of the bleach anything that is left over on this node I'm placing it onto the chopping board and I'm trimming off either end of the node now I'm doing this because basically the alcohol and the bleach will have probably killed off all of the outer tissue on this node and in order for tissue culture to work I need fresh sterile tissue so cutting off either end of the node is basically exposing that tissue I'm opening my groin container on its side to further reduce any chance of contamination and I'm placing the plant material into the agar now honestly this can be a little bit tricky especially for me in this demo as my tweezers just aren't quite long enough to use on these containers so as you can see it's a little bit fiddly but I do get it in the end now that the plant material is inside the agar I'm shutting the lid nice and tight and there you have it there is your prepped tissue culture plant so this is basically what that container looks like of course now I do appreciate it's not the easiest thing to be able to say in there just due to the way that it is but the node is sat there in agar in a 100% sterile environment so that it can start to basically propagate itself and create new shoots so what you just saw there was the very first stage in the tissue culture process because of course the medium that I placed that node in all those nodes in does not stimulate root production from this state that I just showed you before to actual reproduction is going to take several months it's not an overnight thing at all but basically if my trial was of course successful I would then be subculture in these plants once you know enough shoots were developed and then I'd be placing them back into the same growth media again to let them subdivide and produce more shoots again I would then subculture again once I reach the desired quantity you know that I'm happy with I can then take these plants out and put them in a new growth media that would of course produce roots once this is done of course I can continue hardening these plants off probably in my office just to see how they do I might have some losses you know who knows these plants are being grown in essentially test-tube so they're used to 100% humidity you know just great surroundings totally sterile environment moving them out of that can get old cause if you drop it's just what happens but once these plants are hardened off they're free to be potted up and put into soil I'll call you or whatever and growing out from there if the trials I've shown you today are of course successful I will totally do a follow-up video showing you you know the rest of the process and just how everything's gone and the results in a few months time but it will be a few months time I hope this video today has answered some of your questions on tissue culture maybe let you know a few things about tissue culture and what plants are coming onto the market that a tissue cultured and I also hope you've got see a bit of a sense on how to issue culture is actually performed and that concludes this video thank you very very much for watching please leave any questions comments down below feel free to follow my instagram at Cailin official and feel free to subscribe if you'd like to see any more of my content thank you very much for watching and I will see you next week bye guys [Music] you

Channel: Kaylee Ellen

Views: 129,378

Rating: 4.9283853 out of 5

Keywords: kaylee ellen, kaylee ellen plants, plant tissue culture, tissue culture, micropropagation, plant propagation, plants in vitro, kitchen culture, tissue culture 101, shoot culture, tissue culture laboratory, plant laboratory, cloning plants, how to clone a plant, plant growth hormones, botany, tissue cultured plants, rare plant tissue culture, pink princess tissue culture, monstera obliqua tissue culture, tissue culture tutorial, tissue culture techniques, how to tissue culture

Id: SKxgPXOTH4M

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/metamorphosislabs]

Tissue culture has modernized agriculture, but in its simplest form has its limitations. Plenty of starter kits online that will allow one, with limited equipment, to have some success in your home lab. Check out this site: http://www.kitchenculturekit.com/