Table of Contents

Introduction

We just celebrated National Poinsettia Day on December 12.

The day celebrates the vibrant Poinsettia flower and the cultural bridge between US and Mexico, as the plant was first brought to America by American botanist and the first U.S. Minister to Mexico, Joel Roberts in 1825.

And, from 1920, the plant started taking root in American cultures and was used in Christmas floral displays. At that point, Paul Ecke, a second-generation farmer in California developed a grafting technique to grow plants on large scale meeting consumers increasing demands.

Poinsettia is one of the most popular pot plants among gardeners and plant enthusiasts. It’s native to Mexico and Central America. The scientific name of the plant is Euphorbia spp, which belongs to the family of Euphorbiaceae. The genus Euphorbia consists of around 2000 species of flowering plants.

The uppermost leaves of the plants can be seen in a range of colors, from red, and white, to pink, which resembles a flower. However, the flower is generally small in size and resembles the stamen of the flower. An interesting part of the flower is that they remain intact for 3-4 months.

In this article, we discuss methods of growing Poinsettia and how tissue culture can be an effective approach to growing the plant at a commercial scale.

Growing Poinsettia

Poinsettia is a fast-growing shrub and one of the most common growing shrubs worldwide. They are commonly grown either by seeds or cuttings of plants.

In the floral industry, poinsettia production exceeds hundreds of millions of flowers annually and continues to grow. Especially during winter holidays, the plant has special demand and dominates the horticulture market. However, traditional techniques aren’t enough to meet the growing demand.

Some limitations of growing Poinsettia using traditional methods are:

• The slow growth rate of plantlets
• few micro shoots per explant
• Slow root growth rate
• Seeds lose viability during storage
• Genetic variability

The Poinsettia industry needs approaches for:

• Rapid multiplication of elite clones
• The production of pathogen-free plants
• More rapid introduction of novel cultivars (cvs.) with desirable traits

This can only be achieved by using the advanced micropropagation technique.

Tissue Culture of Poinsettia

Tissue culture is an advanced technique for growing plants. It requires only a few tissues of plants to regenerate a whole plant in complete aseptic conditions. The technique allows growers to multiply plants rapidly in small spaces, produce disease-free plants, and preserve them for a long time.

The given procedure is taken from the study of Perera, D., & Trader, B. W. (2010). Poinsettia ‘Prestige™ Red’ (Euphorbia pulcherrima) In Vitro Propagation, HortScience horts, 45(7), 1126-1128. Retrieved Dec 20, 2022, from https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/h...

Procedure to Tissue Culture Poinsettia

• Take a healthy mother plant of E. pulcherrima ‘Prestige Red’ and excise axillary or apical buds from the plant.
• Surface sterilize the explant by keeping it in a 1% Tween 20 solution for 5 minutes followed by transferring it to 70% ethyl alcohol for 1 min.
• Then, transfer the explant to 20% bleach for 15 minutes.
• Rinse the explant in sterile water three times to remove any residue of the chemicals.
• Prepare a culture media using MS media (4.4 g/L), Myo-inositol (0.1 g∙L-1), sucrose (30 g∙L-1) and agar (7 g∙L-1) (pH 5.7–5.8). Then, add 4 μM BA 6-benzylaminopurine.
• Pour the liquid media into 100 ml baby food jars and autoclave them at a temperature of 121 ºC at 15 psi pressure for 15 min.
• After the media is sterilized, take out the culture bottle safely from the autoclave, let it cool down, and place the surface sterilized explant in the media-containing jars.
• Incubate the culture bottles in a growth chamber with 16-h photoperiod (125 μmol∙m-2∙s-1 illuminations) at 25 ºC day and 22 ºC night temperatures.
• Keep subculturing the explant in the same media recipe for four months.
• After four months, plants will be ready to transfer to the rooting media for root generation.
• Prepare rooting media by taking ½ strength MS media, Myo-inositol (0.1 g∙L-1), sucrose (30 g∙L-1), and agar (7 g∙L-1) (pH 5.7–5.8) with 28.5 μM IAA.
• Transfer the regenerated shoots of the plant to the rooting media.
• In 3-4 weeks, you will have Poinsettia plants with well-developed root systems and ready to be acclimated to greenhouse conditions.

HOW DOES PLANT CELL TECHNOLOGY HELP YOU TO ACHIEVE YOUR TISSUE CULTURE GOALS?

Plant Cell Technology is helping tissue culturists worldwide by providing unique and world-class products and services that smoothen their process. The PCT Store has MS media, agar, gellan gum, Plant Preservative Mixture (PPM™), culture vessels, Biocoupler™, and masks in its store to facilitate your processes.

And, that’s not it! Plant Cell Technology also offers consultation services to culturists of all sizes that help to get instant solutions to your tissue culture problems.

You can either book a one-on-one consultation call or a physical visit to your lab. We help you at every step of the tissue culture process, ranging from establishing a tissue culture lab to preventing contamination problems or any specific challenges in your process.

Further, in the coming month, we are conducting a range of Master Classes for tissue culture enthusiasts like you. The class offers you the great opportunity to directly learn from the experts in the area, who have 10-30+ years of experience.

So, visit plantcelltechnology.com today and learn more about our products and services and how they help you excel in your tissue culture processes.

Happy Culturing!