Plant tissue culture is a collection of techniques used to maintain or grow plant cells, tissues, or organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture medium of known composition. Tissue culture is a technique in which healthy tissues are extracted from living matter or organisms, and in plant tissue culture, this could be either the leaves or other parts of the plant, depending on the protocol. Plant tissue culture is used widely in the plant sciences, forestry, and agriculture to produce clones of a plant in a method known as micropropagation.
A tissue culture plant is a plant that has been grown through tissue culture techniques. Tissue-cultured plants are clones, and the production of exact copies of plants that produce particularly good flowers, fruits, or other desirable traits is one of the advantages of plant tissue culture over traditional methods of propagation. Tissue culture involves the use of small pieces of plant tissue (explants) which are cultured in a nutrient medium under sterile conditions. Using the appropriate growing conditions for each explant type, plants can be induced to rapidly produce new shoots, and, with the addition of suitable hormones, new roots. These plantlets can also be divided, usually at the shoot stage, to produce large numbers of new plantlets. The new plants can then be placed in soil and grown in the normal manner.
