dries666

Hello, I used to do an internship in a tissueculture lab for bananas last year and I was wondering about your working area. It doesn't matter how much u sterilize if u can't properly work in a sterile environment... how do u handle the sterilised meristems when putting them into the culture recipients? One other thing I find is that there might be an issue of oversterilising? In a way, if u completely sterilise something, u do this by killing off every living cell... including banana cells, so maybe the sterilising method is too effective, not only killing off the germs but also the banana meristems? Another thing is the antibiotics u add to your medium. I never recalled the lab using antibiotics in the culture medium, I might be wrong but I think they only autoclaved the medium after it was prepared and just made sure they were working in a horizontal flow cabinet to Ensure nothing contaminating would enter the culture tube.

So I'm not really sure what's going on at your place from your description, I would also think pictures of your cultures would help a lot in figuring out the problem. Anyway, my pointers are just some of the things that might be going wrong in the culture... I think it's not hard to master but it takes some trial and error, together with the right knowledge.

Friendly greetings and good luck with your cultures,
Dries