21 Jan 2021

PPM™ in Action: An Experiment on PPM™ Effectiveness

Anjali Singh, MS

As a content and community manager, I leverage my expertise in plant biotechnology, passion for tissue culture, and writing skills to create compelling articles, simplifying intricate scientific concepts, and address your inquiries. As a dedicated science communicator, I strive to spark curiosity and foster a love for science in my audience.

Table of Contents

Contamination is the biggest and most common challenge in tissue culture labs or rooms. The primary requirement for tissue culture is to maintain aseptic conditions. We spend a lot of money to save our cultured plants from pathogen attacks. The other major challenge is that pathogens or microbes can invade our cultures in several ways. To counter act this problem, Plant Cell Technology Inc. developed a sustainable and long term solution for all these contamination issues in plant tissue culture.

Plant preservative mixture (PPM™) is the most effective formulation that is used as broad-spectrum biocide in tissue culture experiments. It can protect your cultures from all types of contamination whether it's airborne, water-borne, through our hands, media, and equipment used during the culturing processes, or endogenous contaminants. It inhibits and kills fungal spores and bacterial contamination from all these sources.

Does PPM Have any Drawbacks? How is it more Effective than Antibiotics?

Several culturists use antibiotics to avoid contamination, but it has several drawbacks. Antibiotics can affect the growth of your cultures and if some microbes are resistant to them, it becomes difficult to remove them from your cultures. Antibiotics are also found to disturb the original genome pool of the plants that culturists want to maintain.

Plant preservative mixture (PPM™) doesn’t have any negative impact on the growth of the cultured plants. It also doesn’t disturb the genetic or genome of the cultured plants. It is stable at a higher temperature as well which makes it feasible with the process of autoclaving the culture media. PPM™ prevents the contaminants from invading your cultures or even taking root in the first place.

How much PPM™ do I add to Tissue Culture Media?

The recommended dose of PPM™ is 0.5 to 2 ml/L. So, the use of PPM™ in the recommended dosage range doesn’t impair the in vitro seed germination, callus proliferation, callus regeneration, and bud induction. Moreover, to avoid endogenous contamination, it is recommended to place the explants in 4-5% v/v PPM™ solution, supplemented with full MS strength basal salts without pH adjustment and Tween 20, for 4-12 hours.

PPM Experiment: How Effective is PPM in Preventing Contamination?

The tissue culture products of Plant Cell Technology Inc. are researched and tested for their effectiveness at all levels. But, what if you can see live how effective PPM™ is in preventing contamination. Wouldn't that be exciting!!

To show you PPM™ in action, a small experiment is performed and recorded for you (see the above-attached video).

What’s shown in the video?

The experimental setup shown in the video is discussed below:

1. 20 cups were prepared that contained MS media with 20 grams of sucrose, 1 ml/L PPM™, 3 grams gellan gum, and no hormones.
2. Then, 5 cups were contaminated by drawing a zig-zag pattern using the Q-tips (that were kept in the mouth for 30 seconds).
3. After contaminating the cups, 15 cups were evenly spread inside the laminar hood and 5 were kept outside the laminar hood on the table. The cups were left open like that for an hour without their lids.
4. After an hour, the lids were placed back and kept on a tissue culture shelf.
5. After three days of contamination, the cups were checked and found to have no signs of contamination. So, whether the cups were in a laminar hood or outside, they didn't show any bacterial growth. This shows how effective PPM™ is in preventive contamination in cultures as well.
6. The serial number of experimental cups with their results are shown below:

All these cups are still kept under observation to show if and when the contamination is observed in the plates. You will be updated with this case in the coming videos. So, don’t forget to subscribe to the Youtube channel of PlantCellTechnology.

Keep visiting the plant cell technology website for the latest updates on blogs and videos only made for the culturists like you to help in your culturing processes.

With the given experimental results you must have got the feel of the effectiveness of PPM™ towards contamination. So, it saves a lot of time and effort of culturists by avoiding contamination at all levels.