Tissue Cultures Flashcards
All 6 cards in this deck
What is tissue culture?
Growing cells or small pieces of tissue on a sterile nutrient medium to produce genetically identical new cells or organisms.
What are the steps of plant tissue culture?
e.g. producing many orchids from one parent plant
- Take a small tissue sample (explant) from the parent plant — a few cells from the orchid
- Grow it on a sterile nutrient medium with plant hormones — cells divide to form a mass of tissue
- Transfer the plantlets to soil — many orchids identical to the parent
Why must tissue culture be carried out in aseptic (sterile) conditions?
To stop microorganisms contaminating the culture and killing the growing cells.
Give two advantages of tissue culture in plant breeding programmes.
Large numbers of identical plants with the desired characteristics can be made quickly, and rare or endangered plants can be preserved.
Give one advantage of tissue culture in medical research.
Identical cells can be grown to test drugs or study disease, so results are not affected by genetic differences between cells.
True or false? Plants produced by tissue culture are clones of the parent plant.
True. They are grown from the parent's cells by mitosis, so they are genetically identical.