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Simple Home Tissue Culture |
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| If your going to get serious about tissue culture you need to get Carol Stiffs' Kitchen Culture Kit. It comes with EVERYTING needed except household items, jars and work area. Basically you need about $20 in misc stuff with the kit. |
This is a work in progress. Forum members are testing it to see if any tweeking is in order. Please feel free to test it and share the results too. It should prove successful as it is.
Tissue culture, or micro propagation or in vitro, is simply placing plant tissue in a sterile environment and providing it with ideal nutrients for growth. Tissue Culture can produce exact clones of the mother plant but that is very hard to do short of a lab. Plants can grow very fast in TC. Seeds generally get a 2 - 3 year jump, and if you use TC for nothing else you should at least use it on seeds. It makes them sooo much easier. Sundew and flytrap cuttings/seeds should both do well with home-made media.
Chemicals can be used to produce abnormal shoot and root growth. These are not needed unless you are working with difficult tissue or you want a LOT of plants. If you think this is something you are interested in you should get the kit above. Not only will you get everything you need but you will also get an instruction book and professional help.
If all you want to do is get some cuttings to take or sow some seeds then the home-made media may be good enough for you. We start seeds in plain media anyway, so your doing basically the same thing. And TC is the best way to do seeds by far. Sterilize the seeds per my instructions with PPM on the sterilization page, it works great every time.
The room your going to do tissue culture in needs to be isolated from the rest of the house. You can not have people/pets in and out and there can be no air movement. This is a must, it must be adhered to. I use the kitchen late at night after everyone goes to bed or during the day when everyone is gone. The kitchen will be the most convenient place to do tissue culture if you can keep everyone out and stop any drafts/air movement. See the sterilization section of the website for more info on this. If you are not using PPM you will need to do everything mentioned meticulously. If you want to use BAP or any other growth regulators you need to use the MS media and PPM. With PPM air born contamination is rare.
Please use the links below to walk through the tissue culture process from beginning to end. The links are on all of the how to tissue culture pages.