Low cost options for tissue culture technology in developing countries. Proceedings of a technical meeting

Tissue culture technology is used for the production of doubled haploids, cryopreservation, propagating new plant varieties, conserving rare and endangered plants, difficult-to-propagate plants, and to produce secondary metabolites and transgenic plants. The production of high quality planting material of crop plants and fruit trees, propagated from vegetative parts, has created new opportunities in global trading, benefited growers, farmers, and nursery owners, and improved rural employment. However, there are still major opportunities to produce and distribute high quality planting material, e.g. crops like banana, date palm, cassava, pineapple, plantain, potato, sugarcane, sweet potato, yams, ornamentals, fruit and forest trees. The main advantage of tissue culture technology lies in the production of high quality and uniform planting material that can be multiplied on a year-round basis under disease-free conditions anywhere irrespective of the season and weather. However, the technology is capital, labor and energy intensive. Although, labor is cheap in many developing countries, the resources of trained personnel and equipment are often not readily available. In addition, energy, particularly electricity, and clean water are costly. The energy requirements for tissue culture technology depend on day temperature, day-length and relative humidity, and they have to be controlled during the process of propagation. Individual plant species also differ in their growth requirements. Hence, it is necessary to have low cost options for weaning, hardening of micropropagated plants and finally growing them in the field. This publication describes options for reducing costs to establish and operate tissue culture facilities and primarily focus on plant micropropagation. It includes papers on the basics of tissue culture technology, low cost options for the design of laboratories, use of culture media and containers, energy and labor saving, integration and adoption of low cost options, and increasing plant survival after propagation, bioreactors, and outreach of material to the growers and farmers in developing countries. Bioreactors in plant propagation can produce millions of plants and may cut down the cost of plant production, which is yet not commonly used in developing countries. However, in the near future it could be well integrated into large scale commercial micropropagation in both developed and developing countries. In all cases, such options must be integrated without reducing the efficiency of plant propagation and compromising the plant quality. This TECDOC was prepared on the basis of contributions made by the participants in the Technical Meeting on Low Cost Tissue Culture Technology for Developing Countries, Vienna, 26-30 August 2002. This publication should be of great value to plant propagators, managers of tissue culture laboratories, scientists, organizations contemplating the establishment of new laboratories, and ongoing commercial concerns, all of whom may wish to incorporate low cost options into their day-to-day operations. Also, it would greatly serve plant propagation enterprises in developing countries with scarce funds and poor infrastructure for sustainable food production. Many of the options described can also be integrated in tissue culture laboratories that use mutation induction to develop new mutant varieties of both vegetatively and seed propagated plants, and for rapid release of the selected mutants