Cellular Totipotency helps in Plant Tissue Culture

Cellular Totipotency helps in Plant Tissue Culture:

This is the capacity of nature cells showing that when freed from the plant body, they had the ability to reorganize themselves into the new individuals. Steward and his co-workers showed this phenomenon in the carrot cultures. Here the small pieces of mature carrot root were grown in a liquid medium supplemented with coconut milk, in special containers.

These cultures were shaken generally which freed all the cell clusters into the medium Some developed into rooting clumps When these were transferred to the tubes containing a semi-solid medium, they gave rise to whole plant that flowered and set seeds. On the basis of these experiments, it can be inferred that, at least theoretically, every living plant cell, irrespective of its age and location is totipotent.

However, this phenomenon cannot be compared with the mode of the development of the zygote, wherein the divisions give predictable manner. But in case of cultured cells, the isolated single cells of tobacco divide, quite irregularly to form a mass from which roots and shoot buds differentiate eventually.

However, Guha and Maheswari, while culturing mature anthers of Datura innoxia with an aim of understanding the physiology of meiosis, accidentally noticed that on basal nutrient medium containing kinetin, coconut milk, or grape juice numerous embryo-like structure appeared from the inside of anthers, which eventually developed into plants.

Later on these workers confirmed the origin of the embryoids from pollen gram. As expected, the plantlets of pollen-origin were haploid.