Plant tissue culture: An under-estimated tool in plant production systems

Plant tissue culture plays multiple roles in ensuring sustainable and reliable production systems in both established and emerging plant industries. Plant tissue culture is an important tool used in all aspects of the plant production cycle. Plant tissue culture systems play an important role in breaking disease cycles in industries with established or emerging pathogens by providing clean planting material. Virus indexed tissue cultured plants allow for safe global movement and access to germplasm for improved and disease resistant cultivars. Although tissue culture plants are grown in sterile media consideration must be made to indexing tissue culture plants to ensure they are free from pathogens such as viruses, phytoplasma and bacteria. Indexing is also important to identify non-pathogens to improve tissue culture production efficiency and for research applications such as cryopreservation and germplasm collections. Tissue culture is also used to eliminate pests and pathogens. Plant tissue culture is important in plant improvement and development of new cultivars, both directly (mutation breeding, inducing polyploidy, virus elimination) and indirectly (polyploid parents from improved diploids in breeding programs, embryo rescue, rapid multiplication of breeding selections, molecular biology to improve cultivars). Moving forward plant tissue culture will play an increasingly important role in a wider range of applications such as bioreactor production systems to produce valuable food, industry and health products. Some relevant examples used in horticultural crops will be briefly discussed