Tag: plant tissue culture

Plant cells are totipotent. Hence, plant cells can be cultured to grow entire plants. In-plant tissue culture, a small meristematic tissue called explant is used to generate a mass of undifferentiated cells called callus. Entire plantlets can be generated from callus by applying a carefully balanced ratio of phytohormones.

totipotency is the ability of a plant to use all its genes and form a new plant. to prove this F.C Steward did an experiment on the root cells of the carrot plant with which he produced a whole new carrot plant.

The potential of the somatic cell to grow and develop into a multicellular and multi-organed organism through the technique of cloning is referred to as cellular totipotency. While German botanist Gottleib Haberlandt introduced the concept of in vitro cell culture, Prof. F.C. Steward of Cornell University worked to show that cellular totipotency is an inherent capability of every single cell. Thus, the correct answer is option A.

Totipotency is the ability of a single cell to divide and produce all of the differentiated cells in an organism. Spores and zygotes are examples of totipotent cells. In the spectrum of cell potency, totipotency represents the cell with the greatest differentiation potential. Many somatic plant cells, including some fully differentiated types (e.g., leaf mesophyll), provided they contain intact nuclear, plastid and mitochondrial genomes, have the capacity to regenerate into whole plants. 

Somaclonal variation is the variation seen in plants that have been produced by plant tissue culture. Chromosomal rearrangements are an important source of this variation. The term somaclonal variation is a phenomenon of broad taxonomic occurrence, reported for species of different ploidy levels and for outcrossing and inbreeding, vegetatively and seed propagated and cultivated and non-cultivated plants. Characters affected include both, qualitative and quantitative traits. Somaclonal variation is seen in tissue culture grown plants.
Somaclonal variation is not restricted to, but is particularly common in, plants regenerated from callus. The variations can be genotypic or phenotypic, which in the latter case can be either genetic or epigenetic in origin.
Typical genetic alterations are: changes in chromosome numbers (polyploidy and aneuploidy), chromosome structure (translocations, deletions, insertions and duplications) and DNA sequence (base mutations). A typical epigenetics-related event would be gene methylation.

Explant is any portion taken from a plant that will be used to initiate a culture. It can be a portion of the shoot or of the leaves or even just some cells. Thus, the correct answer is option C. 

Totipotency is the ability of a single cell to divide and produce all of the differentiated cells in an organism. Many somatic plant cells, including some fully differentiated types (e.g., leaf mesophyll), provided they contain intact nuclear, plastid and mitochondrial genomes, have the capacity to regenerate into whole plants. This phenomenon is totipotency.

Explant culture is a technique used for the isolation of cells from a piece or pieces of tissue. Tissue harvested in this manner is called as an explant. It can be a portion of the shoot, leaves or some cells from a plant or can be any part of the tissue from an animal or from umblical cord tissue. So, explant is small part of the plant meant for tissue culture and not uprooted for transplantation, plant, collected after harvesting or exploited part of a plant

Micropropagation is the method of large production of plantlets in a less time. In this method, a small piece of plant tissue (explant) is cultured in a sterile medium which later develops into new plantlets. The offsprings produced by this methods are the exact copy of their parent plant.