Quote:
Originally Posted by greenfumb
Do you have to use a Musa pup for the donor TC. Can a young clone plant be used. I am asking because I want to try TC and I dont have any adult plants, or pups. I only have some growing clones for tissue.
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If you are just experimenting, it is fine to use a young TC plant instead of a field grown sucker (if that's what you mean), just as long as it is a healthy growing plant.
If it were a serious professional project and you were producing them in high quantity, then it should be avoided. This is because there tends to be a small number of plants produced from TC which are "off-types", and the resulting plants are not true-to-type. If you use a young tissue cultured plant as starting stock, you have no guarantee the plant is true-to-type and you could be creating a bunch of off-type plants. For this reason, a well run banana tissue culture lab will only produce about 5 subculture cycles from a single sucker, and then discontinue that line and start over from a new field-grown sucker which has been verified true-to-type.