Advantages and Disadvantage of Tissue Culture Technique in Banana
In this article, we will see the advantages and disadvantages of tissue culture technique in banana.
Tissue culture is the science of multiplying clean disease-free planting materials of different crops and you have many identical copies of the same variety without changing the taste and any other physical attribute of the plant.
This tissue culture work is done in agricultural laboratories and then the plants are raised in nursery beds where farmers can buy them ready for planting.
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Why tissue culture?
Suckers generally may be infected with some pathogens and nematodes. Similarly, due to the variation in age and size of sucker the crop is not uniform, harvesting is prolonged and management becomes difficult.
Tissue culture technique is composed of five important steps such as Initiation of aseptic culture, Multiplication, Shooting and Rooting, Primary hardening in greenhouse and Secondary hardening in shade net houses.
Advantages and Disadvantages of tissue culture technique in banana
Advantages of Tissue Culture Technique in Banana:
- True to the type of mother plant. No room for variations in a well managed plant production.
- Banana plantlets of Tissue Culture are disease free at the time of planting. Same conditions can be maintained by proper crop maintenance practices.
- Banana tissue culture plantlets are available throughout the year. So bananas, can be grown year around without any shortage of tissue cultured plant material.
- The other biggest advantage is that tissue cultured banana plants produces uniform maturity of the fruits which can make harvesting process easy and reduce labor cost.
- Ratoon crop ( The main benefit of ratooning is that the crop matures earlier in the season) is a unique feature of Tissue culture banana plants.
- Using tissue culture plants, one can obtain 3 crops in 30 to 32 months period which can save 4 to 5 months of cultivation period in the field.
- 95 to 98% plants bear bunches.
- High benefit to cost ratio ensure good profits
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Disadvantages of Tissue Culture Technique in Banana:
- The experiments involved in tissue culture are expensive because the expensive machinery and reagents required
- This process in complex and has varied procedures depending on the plant type.
- The experiments of tissue culture must be handled by highly trained people as the procedure requires special are and careful observation.
- Because all the plants are genetically similar, there is reduction is genetic diversity.
- There is no introduction of any new genes in the gene pool of the whole stock.
- If a plant is susceptible to disease, all the plants of this cloned stock will share this undesirable trait and be susceptible to that particular disease.
- On a large scale production tissue culture methods is very expensive as the cost of the equipments are very high.
- The procedure depends of the type of species being cultured; hence there is a need of trial and error method for any new species if there is no review about that species.
- Sometimes there is a possibility of error in the identity of the organism after culture,
- If precautions are not taken the whole stock may be contaminated or infected.
- Tissue culture, cloning decreases genetic variability.
- Monoculture is produced due to tissue culture and all the progeny may be vulnerable to the same infections or diseases.
- Samples of infected plants produce infected progeny; all the plants of the stock must be carefully screened to prevent culturing infected plants.
- Tissue culture is not successful with all plant species usually because of the growth medium and some plants produce secondary metabolites that might kill the explants.
- Some plants are difficult to disinfect of fungal infections.
See also :
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