Micropropagate Your Own Exotic Plant Varieties Or Prize-Winners!
Exotic Plant Tissue Culture is the way of the future for and at Plant Biotech, we offer you an opportunity to be at the leading edge of the market as well as to be able to make significant financial savings.
If you have any favourite exotic varieties or varieties that are difficult to procure/propagate by conventional methods, bring them to us and we will attempt to put them into tissue for you. For full details on introducing your plants into tissue and the exotics now available, please contact us. To know more about Exotic Plants, read this Wikipedia article.
We are also involved in introducing selected exotic plants/hybrids from renowned growers/breeders into tissue. Some of these are world class hybrids involving an exclusive buy back arrangement with the owners of the hybrid line. If you have any interesting plants that may have good commercial potential then please contact us. We can discuss a plan for introducing your plant into tissue.
Tissue culture laboratories usually charge a fee for introducing unique plants into tissue due to the high costs associated. We will work out the best arrangement that will suit your requirements. This means you may not be required to pay a full fee for introducing your selected varieties into tissue. Under certain circumstances, where an exclusive agreement has been established, the fee can be waived fully. The more plants you introduce through us, the better it gets. We maintain and respect the ownership of the plant material to its breeder/grower/owner. We will also ensure you are kept up to date with developments so that you are fully informed throughout the entire process.
Plant Biotech is a medium size operation, flexible enough to create a plan that will suit your requirements.
Tissue Culture Facilities:
A tissue culture laboratory, like a research laboratory, has to adhere to strict standards of cleanliness and good laboratory practices. Our state of the art laboratory on the Sunshine Coast has been accredited by AQIS (Australian Quarantine Inspection Service) as Quarantine Approved Premises for export of tissue culture plants.
Carefully selected plants are put into tissue inside the laboratory. The resulting plantlets are then transferred into our modern greenhouses for further hardening, and remain there until they are ready for sale.
What's Tissue Culture?
Tissue culture involves the mass production of true-to-type plants from carefully selected, good quality sources ('mother' plants, seeds, pups, tubers etc.) in a sterile environment, under controlled conditions of light, temperature and humidity. The plantlets (as they are referred to while in the laboratory) are grown in tubs or bottles containing an agar medium, in which hormones, nutrients and growth regulators are added in exact quantities, specific to each plant variety.
The end-result is fully rooted plantlets that can be either exported at this ex-agar stage (as they have had no prior contact with soil), or transferred into a greenhouse to be further acclimatized to growing in the soil under natural conditions, a process commonly known as hardening off. As these plants are grown exponentially under near-ideal conditions, they have excellent vigour, are disease free and hardy, and can be obtained in large numbers and uniform sizes in a short period of time as compared to conventional techniques.
The best and most proven techniques, if not followed correctly, can yield poor results.
Plantlets that have undergone too many cycles and therefore lost their vigour, poorly rooted plantlets that have spent insufficient time in the rooting media, or very tiny plantlets that have been transferred to the greenhouse too soon, are all bound to fall short and fail to thrive. However, each stage meticulously followed with careful attention to detail can produce beautiful, robust plants that may seem expensive at first, but prove extremely economic in the long run.
Apart being true-to-type and disease resistant, advantages of using the tissue culture techniques are that:
- It is possible to predetermine and manage the quantities produced according to requirement. This allows us to cater to small as well as big growers. The ability to produce numbers as per requirement also makes it possible for growers to manage their production schedules accurately.
- Varieties that otherwise have a very small chance of propagating, or would take very long to germinate from seeds (some bromeliad seeds could take up to a year to just germinate) can be easily propagated, and the required size and numbers can be obtained within a short period of time.
- Potential buyers and interested bromeliad lovers are not restricted access to these plants due to geographical barriers. Tissue culture plants having had no prior contact with soil, can be transported the world over in sterile plastic tubs.