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The below mentioned article will highlight the sixteen important applications of plant tissue culture.
1. The use of plant cells to generate useful products and or services constitutes plant biotechnology.
2. In plant biotechnology, the useful product is a plantlet. The plantlets are used for various purposes.
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3. All the cells in callus or suspension culture are derived from a single explant by mitotic division.
4. Therefore, all plantlets regenerated from a callus/suspension culture generally have the same genotype and constitute a clone. These plantlets are used for rapid clonal propagation.
5. Genetic variation present among plant cells of a culture is called soma clonal variation.
6. A gene that is transferred into an organism by genetic engineering is known as transgene.
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7. An organism that contains and expresses a transgene is s, called transgenic organism.
8. The transgenes can be introduced into individual plant cells. The plantlets can be regenerated from these cells.
9. These plantlets give rise to the highly valuable transgenic plants.
10. Mutagens are added to single cell liquid cultures for induction of mutations.
11. Tolerance to stress like pollutants, toxins, salts, drought, flooding, etc. can also be obtained by providing them in culture medium in increasing dosage. The surviving healthy cells are taken to solid medium for raising resistant plants.
12. Weedicides are added to culture initially in very small concentrations.
13. Dosage is increased in subsequent cultures till the desired level of weedicide resistance is obtained.
14. The resistant cells are then regenerated to form plantlets and plants.
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15. Both apical and axillary meristems are free from virus even if the whole plant is infected by it. Virus free plantlets are obtained by using meristem culture to grow new plants.
16. Embryos which normally do not survive inside seeds can be grown in tissue culture to form new plants. It is useful in interspecific hybridization.