Introduction to Plant Tissue Cultures
                     Introduction to Plant Tissue Cultures 
 
Plant tissue culture techniques are the foremost frequently used biotechnological tools for basic and 
applied purposes starting from investigation on plant developmental processes, functional gene 
studies, commercial plant micropropagation, generation of transgenic plants with specific industrial 
and agronomical traits, plant breeding and crop improvement, virus elimination from infected 
materials to render high-quality healthy material , preservation and conservation of germplasm of 
vegetative propagated plant crops, and rescue of threatened or endangered plant species. 
Additionally, plant cell and organ cultures are of interest for the assembly of secondary 
metabolites of commercial and pharmaceutical interest. New technologies, like the genome editing 
ones combined with tissue culture and Agrobacterium tumefaciens infection, are currently 
promising alternatives for the highly specific genetic manipulation of interesting agronomical or 
industrial traits in crop plants. Application of omics (genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics) 
to plant part culture will definitely help to unravel complex developmental 
processes like organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis, which can probably enable to 
enhance the efficiency of regeneration protocols for recalcitrant species. Additionally, metabolomics 
applied to tissue culture will facilitate the extraction and characterization of complex mixtures of 
natural plant products of commercial interest. General and specific aspects and applications of plant 
part culture and therefore the advances and perspectives are described during this edition. 
 
Introduction 
Introduction plant part culture may be a broad term that refers to the culture of any a part of a plant 
(cells, tissues, or organs) in artificial media, in aseptic conditions, and under controlled environments. 
This set of techniques emerged as an experimental approach to demonstrate the cell doctrine , 
which establishes that each one living organisms are constituted of cells, the essential units of 
structure and reproduction, and also the totipotency concept, which is defined because the genetic 
potential of a cell to get a whole multicellular organism. Different attempts were conducted by 
several researchers to research the 
 
Conditions to initially achieve the expansion of organs or tissues in a man-
made nutrient medium rather than isolated cells due to the complex nutritional and hormonal 
requirements they have . Nutrient solutions alone or supplemented with natural extracts were used 
as starting culture media, and a few important results were reported [5]; however, the invention of 
plant growth regulators was determinant for the successful establishment of in vitro plant 
part cultures . A key advance in plant part culture was the control of morphogenesis by using 
different levels and combinations of growth regulators [8], because this allowed the regeneration of 
entire plants, opening the likelihood of using in vitro systems to review fundamental aspects of cell 
differentiation and development, and also for the appliance of tissue culture for 
various purposes. another relevant advances in plant part culture were the culture of meristems as a 
tool for getting virus-free plants ; the demonstration of totipotency in haploid or gametophyte cells, 
which made possible the faster generation of isogenic lines important for plant breeding programs; 
the rescue of hybrid embryos to beat sexual incompatibility between plant species ; the enzymatic 
degradation of cell walls of plant cells to supply protoplasts and therefore therefore the fusion of 
those naked cells to eliminate sexual barriers between different plant species to render intraspecific 
or interspecific somatic hybrids; and the production of secondary compounds using cell or organ 
cultures , and maybe the foremost relevant advance in plant part culture was the event and 
establishment of genetic transformation systems by Agrobacterium tumefactions infection and 
thru particle bombardment to permit the genetic manipulation of plant species. 
 
Basic Principles of Cell, Tissue, and Organ Culture Anyone who wishes to start out plant 
tissue cultures should have in mind the subsequent basic principles: 
1. Select appropriate explants from a healthy and vigorous plant. 
2. Eliminate microbial contamination from the surface of the explants. 
3. Inoculate the explants in an adequate medium , 
4. Provide the explants in culture with the right controlled environmental conditions. 
In the case of in vitro regenerated plants, they're subjected to an adaptation process 
(acclimatization) within the greenhouse before the transference to ex vitro conditions. counting 
on the a part of the plant that's cultured, we will refer them as cell culture (gametic cells, cell 
suspension, and protoplast culture), tissue culture (callus and differentiated tissues), and organ 
culture (any organ like zygotic embryos, roots, shoots, and anthers, among others). Each sort 
of culture is employed for various basic and biotechnological applications.