Cloning 101: Plant Tissue Culture

Hiral M. Chavre
5 min readApr 25, 2021

An overview of the fascinating process of plant tissue culture!

Learn how to clone your plants! | Source |

Cloning is possible. Yep, right here, right now. Even though we aren’t at the stage where we can make another copy of ourselves in an instant, we can clone plant tissues, which is one step closer to the cloning we think of.

Plant tissue culturing is a fascinating process. It is the creation of new plant tissue by transferring it into a nutrient media to cultivate it under controlled conditions. Also known as micropropagation, plant tissue culture can increase the production yield among other benefits.

How does plant culturing even work?

As suggested by the name, plant tissue cultures all start with a plant, specifically small pieces of plants known as explants 🌱. Explants can range from the stem of the plant to the leaves and can come from any type of plant.

Start with a small explant and watch it grow! | Source |

These explants are then put into a nutrient medium to help them grow 🧪and undergo the culture process. There are different types of nutrient mediums that can be utilized, as discussed by Plant Cell Technology:

  • Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium

--

--

Hiral M. Chavre

Hey! 👋 I’m Hiral and I’m a curious 16-year-old diving deep into emerging technologies like cellular agriculture!