tissue culture

Does anyone have experience with tissue culture?? From what I have gleaned so far it seems to be a pretty expensive process. There must be a 'home-made' method somewhere. Any suggestions?

http://www.kitchenculturekit.com/index.htm Has a lot of good data. You can probably set up a reasonably funtional lab for under 200$ There are other web sites that have even less expensive approches to tissue culture. Do a google search on "tissue culture orchids" substitute the plant you want to culture for the word orchids. Read everything you can.
Some plants culture better than others. Some we know what to do with and others we have yet to learn.
Tissue culture allows you to reproduce a plant that might take years to replicate.
Tissue culture has the potential to increase the odds of mutation.
Tissue culture has been used to eliminate virus and bacterial from valuable plants.
Tissue culture may eliminate symbiotic microorganisms from a plant.

In other words, tissue culture is a valuable tool, but it's still in it's infancy.
-Bob

The big problem with home set ups is that it's incredibly hard to keep everything sterile. I ended up with jars of mould that started out as Begonia and that was in a college lab *G*.

What are you thinking of micropropagating?

Had thought about trying to culture poppies.Now and then a really good one pops up but is too hard to raise true to form from seed,and being annual won't hold over for the following year.

When we first had the garden we had a double form popp up that we wanted to keep. We did it the old fashioned way and now have our selected P. som. come true 95-98% since 1996. That also means we can't grow any other cultivars or forms to prevent contamination so not a method everyone would be happy with.

Best of luck to you if you give micropropagation a go!

balvenie I've never tried it myself but here's a page of links (thanks Henry!) on tissue culture. Fascinating subject, would love to try one day when I have more time and $.

http://home.neo.rr.com/kuska/tissue_cultureindex.htm

Hth,
Diana

Thanks Bob and Diana,That's a lot of good information to digest.When I looked into it earlier it seemed like a lot of money to 'clone' a poppy.It still sounds like an interesting project,and as with something new there seem to always be other uses you never thought of when you started.

I have instructions from a doctor friend of mine for tissue culture. Yes, everything must be sterile. I will look for these instructions that was in the CSSA Journal. This is a home setup, with little expense. Crasulady2

I just found this. It looks really interesting.

http://www.une.edu.au/~agronomy/AgSSrHortTCinfo.html

Thanks Sylvi74, that was a sight I had read a while back and then lost track of. I have hunted and hunted for that one, and you just found the link for me. The recipes for growth cultures are the valuable thing. With that data the only real expense is your time and growth regulators for some of the more difficult plants.

-Bob

Thank you for the new link. I helped give a class to Master Gardeners and Junior Master Gardeners several times on this. We used material from Carolina Educational Materials for the preprepared tubes and gel but had unending problems with contamination. The sterile box was easy to construct out of good transparent plastic over a PVC frame and was very cheap and could be kept sterile for a long time. I think our problem was our unsterile arms. I got much better results when I had the kids clean their hands and arms with the packaged handiwipes. Best results when they repeated the cleaning with a second handiwipe. The purchased growing medium made it too expensive to continue the experiment but this way there may be a chance of doing it again. I didn't have a whole lot of luck with the Kitchen Culture site. Jessamine

KitchenCultureKit.com Dr Stiff is a great lady to get info from. You need a modeately sterile area to work in. If you use a chemical called PPM you will have, what I feel is a more forgiving media!

Chris