Quote:
Originally Posted by griphuz
If I'm correct all TC from bananas is done from meristem tissue right? So you would have to sacrifice a sucker to go TC right?
Did anyone ever try to TC starting with just a piece of leaf?
I've heared it might be possible to re-differenciate the cells to differenciete them later on into leaf, root, or whatever...
Kind regards,
Remko.
|
You do have to "sacrifice" a sucker, but if successful, you won't actually kill it and will end up with exponentially more identical plants.
Creating meristematic tissue from leaf tissue is not done, and has not been done with bananas as far as I know (one method of somatic embryogenesis). However, pieces of corm and the very bottom portions of sheath have been used during somatic embryogensis, but this is not done to micropropagate due to unacceptably high mutation rates, it is often done when trying to transform a plant through gene transfer however. Also, immature flowers (usually male, sometimes female) are used in the same fashion. Only shoot tip cultures (meristem) is normally used for mass producing banana plants.