Mark Fawcett wrote:

Does any one have any info on plant micropropagation? Its something
Ive wanted to try out particularily on some plants that i would like
to rapidly increase the numbers of as I want to start my own nursery
next year - I cant face the thought of working in an office at my desk
until Im dead or retired !!
Life has to be better than that %)

See also:
//
Jim
--------------------
Science Experiments on Environmental Education and Biology
http://www.funsci.com/fun3_en/exper1/exper1.htm
Monday, August 18, 2003

PLANT TISSUE CULTUREIMG:lnk
If placed in a suitable nutrient environment, cells and tissues of many
organisms are able to reproduce and form new plants or animals. Now, we
will deal with vegetable tissues, whose culture is simpler than that of
animal cellules and tissues. It is necessary to prepare a nutritive and
sterilized culture medium for the piece of plant tissue. Keep the
culture in the suitable conditions of light and temperature and which
vary from plant to plant. Over many days, you will observe the growth of
a callus or roots or shoots. In this way you can obtain even whole
plants (cloning). These experiments show that special cells keep all the
information necessary to generate the whole plant.
As we have mentioned, it is necessary avoid bacteria and moulds in the
cultures. For this you will need sterilize tools, vials, tubes, and
nutrient medium. Place each in an autoclave for a ten minutes or,
lacking an autoclave, a pressure cooker. The tissues as well have to be
free from microorganisms and they have to be sterilized with bleach (40%
solution for 15 min) or with alcohol.
The transfer of the tissues into the test tubes has to be made in
aseptic conditions, using a sterile box. Lacking that, make your first
trials in a quiet place, as devoid of wind and dust as possible. The
culture medium should contain water, vitamins (particularly those of the
B-complex. For this, use yeast extract), sugars, mineral salts. To
enrich the water with mineral salts, boil some water with a handful of
soil, then let settle and filter it. Usually, people also insert
0.5-0.8% of agar-agar to "solidify" the medium. As culture medium,
coconut milk has been used. It contains mineral salts, sugars, vitamins
and growth hormones. 1 - For yours first tests of micropropagation, use
strawberries tissues.
2 - If this simple experiment interests you, you can continue on the way
of the in vitro culture of vegetable tissues. In fact you can propagate
a lot of plants in this way. Plants easy to culture are the following:
tomato, potato, strawberry, chrysanthemum, geranium, sunflower, tobacco,
carrot and onion. You can use tissues obtained from seeds, such as the
embryo, but you can use also tissues taken from adult plants, such as
tissues of roots, stems, apical buds, shoots, leaves, even single cells.
Each plant and tissue has its own needs. They are different from each
other. You can try the influence of the vegetable hormones, special
nutrients, etc.
This field is very broad and complex so, if you are interested in
continuing with these experiments, you can buy special books and you
should build a sterile box.
http://tomgreen-ext.tamu.edu/mg/tissue.htm Plant Tissue Culture for the
Gardener http://user.school.net.th/~anuparp/bptc1.htm Basic Principle in
Plant Tissue Culture Technique
http://www.flytrap.demon.co.uk/cc/data/tcn1_man.htm Plant Tissue Culture
Kit Manual
http://www.biotech.iastate.edu/publi...AV_Micropropag
ation.html Plant Micropropagation Using African Violet Leaves
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/t...microprop.html
Plant Tissue Culture (links)
Internet keywords: in vitro culture plant tissue micropropagation.