20 Oct 2022

How To Find Tissue Culture Media Recipe For Your Desired Plants?

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

Introduction

“Please share the media recipe of the hoyas plant”.

“Where can I get the protocol to tissue culture my buce plant?”

“Can you tell your media recipe for nepenthes?”

Regularly we get such queries from our beginner culturists or tissue culture enthusiast around the world.

But, what if I tell you there’s a solution using which you can independently find a solution to these challenges? Neither do you have to wait for the replies of other culturists nor waste your time searching for culturists who are working on the same plant as yours and providing updates on their process.

After reading this blog, you will be completely independent and capable to find tissue culture protocols on your own. So, let’s get started!

Why Do Culturists Keep Their Tissue Culture Protocol A Secret?

Most culturists as you know do not feel comfortable sharing the procedure of tissue culturing their plants. They keep it secret or sell it on conditionals to people after receiving some money for the effort.

Why is it so?

As you know it takes a lot more effort in designing a perfect protocol for the successful introduction of the plant in tissue culture. Each stage of the tissue culture needs to be optimized. Let’s understand it better with examples.

Explant collection: One needs to understand what part of the plant will help better to fulfill the purpose of the study.
Surface sterilization stage: You need to know what chemical should you use for the sterilization of the explant, what will be the exposure time, which combination of chemicals will work better, what amount of chemical won’t kill the plant, and many more.
Initiation stage: What media formulation will be able to induce growth in plants?
Multiplication stage: What plant hormones will be better for your plants and in what concentration? Also, what combination of hormones will do the job better?
Rooting stage: Which rooting hormone in what concentration will provide better regeneration?
Acclimation stage: What materials should one use to acclimate plants, and what conditions should be provided?

As you can see, so many questions are there at every stage of the tissue culture. And, to find the answer to these questions scientists have to curate multiple combinations of chemicals and media formulation, which take months to provide the correct answer questions. Also, it might happen that at one time, the scientists only found answers to a couple of questions from the early stages. Thus, to find the answers to others they need to repeat the process.

Now you know it takes a lot of time and effort for culturists to create one perfect procedure to introduce a plant species into tissue culture.

How to Find Available Tissue Culture Protocol For Your Desired Plant?

Tissue culture procedure for any plant you want might be easily and openly present for your use. However, you must know how to find that resource. There are certain ways that are explained here.

Plants are classified in the given hierarchy:

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

Whenever you are looking for a procedure, first try to search with the “species” of the plant. When you don’t find information related to specific species, move upward in the classification and search at the genus level.

Though plants differ at the species level, however, the protocol could be tried expecting they might work for your desired plant species as well. If not completely, at least the protocol will get you close to the tissue culture procedure.

Google Search

Now follow the given steps to search for the tissue culture protocol of your desired plant species:

Go to google search and type “[Name of your desired plant] tissue culture”.
On the google page, you will find many results but not all of them will be useful.
Exclude all the search results related to seller websites.
Find pdf of research papers, links from Wiley, Plants, Nature, NCBI, and many similar platforms.
After finding the paper, go to the Abstract (first section after the headline) part of the paper and give it a thorough read to get a better understanding of what the paper says.
Then move to the “Materials and Method” section and start noting down what chemicals they used, in what concentration, what steps they followed, and how did they do it.
Then move to the “Results and Discussion” section to learn how effective the process worked for them and what the way they are talking about in which it can be improved.
Then, for more such studies you can go to the reference section of the paper and look for papers displaying information on your desired plants.
Once you find the resource, copy and paste it into google to get the paper.
This way you will have multiple information on the same plants and you can decide by yourself which one you want to use and if something is not working out, what it could be.

Sometimes it might also happen that you found the tissue culture protocol for the same plant species. However, it didn’t work out for you the same way it did for the researchers. This may be because even after being the same species, both plants are technically in different environments.

Every time after the process, you need to analyze the results, to learn what and what not worked for you while following the process. This will also prepare you for your future studies.

Google Scholar Search

In google, search for google scholar.
Got to the main page of google scholar.
Search “[Plant Name] tissue culture”.
You will get many results from research papers done on your desired plants.
Click on one of the links of your choice, that you find more relevant and suitable to your interest.
Repeat the process after this as given in the previous section.

Plant Cell Technology Blog and YouTube Videos

Other than google search you can also find protocols of some plants on our blogs and youtube videos. Every week we post two blogs related to tissue culture and videos to teach you how to perform the technique in the right way.

To find the protocol of your plants, you can simply search “[name of plant] tissue culture” in the search bar of our website and you will get all the available articles on the subject. You can do the same by visiting our youtube channel and you will all the results on your plants.

All the information present on the blog is extracted from research papers or different articles available on the internet on the topic. And, on youtube whatever we show is tried and tested in our lab.

Watch this video to learn more about finding a suitable tissue culture protocol for your plants:

Find Tissue Culture Protocols for Any Plant!

HOW CAN PLANT CELL TECHNOLOGY HELP YOU TACKLE YOUR TISSUE CULTURE CHALLENGES?

Now, you might have several questions regarding the mentioned challenges:

How to know which explant is perfect and how to choose them? What characteristic should you observe?
How can one differentiate between low-grade and high-grade chemicals?
How to know which surface sterilization technique is suitable for your plant? And, how to learn about their effect on your chosen explant?
How to know among all the available hormones, which will best suit your plant and in what concentration?
How should you transition your plants from the lab to the greenhouse and acclimate them? What practices or steps to follow?

You can get answers to all these questions and more using our one-on-one phone consultation service. The service allows you to live talk to a tissue culture exert and ask as many questions as you have related to your tissue culture process.

Is this something you're interested in?

Book your appointment now: PCT Consultation Services.

Furthermore, you can also choose a physical-visit consultation if you need help with establishing your lab or training your staff in tissue culture.

And, if you have any tissue culture requirements for your lab, you can always visit the PCT Store and shop for products ranging from MS media, agar, gellan gum, Plant Preservative Mixture (PPM), culture vessels, Biocoupler (TM), and masks that best suit your tissue culture experiments.