Don’t be a failure statistic

Failing in tissue culture experiments is very easy if you are slack in your procedures and careless when you do your initial explants setups. Some of the major reasons that have been cited for unproductive cultures are as follows:

1. Don’t select a difficult plant to clone initially. Leave that “Hemerocallis” alone and select one of the simpler plants to duplicate. You have plenty of time to work your way up to the more complex plant cloning procedures so take your time.

2. Don’t try and rush to get your explants out of their sterile home and into the open. Give them plenty of time to get accustomed to a new environment. It usually will take several weeks to condition your new explants to the open air life so properly pre-treat them in an enclosed system. Failure to heed this advice could cause contamination of the plant that can not at all be eliminated by the mere surface sterilization and ultimately lead to the destruction of your plant.

3. Make certain that you follow the correct procedures to ensure that you do not induce any sort of contamination. Following all advised procedures that pertain to sterilizing instruments and cleaning the various cutting surfaces properly. Make sure that you use your glove box as it was designed to prevent contamination while you are working. I have actually when first becoming involved in micropropagation used my glove box to grow several of the explants in.

4. Don’t try and rush the procedures. If a specific time is stated for leaving your explants in something such as detergent then by all means make sure that you adhere to that time specified. These are not arbitrary time frames but have been established by many trial and error experiments.

Growing tissue cultured plants can be a lot of fun and is an excellent way to spend your spare time so don’t become one of the failure statistics and make the usual mistakes that most newbie’s tend to make. When in doubt ask someone with a bit more knowledge as it will save you a lot of heartache in the long run.

Copyright @ 2009 Joseph Parish
http://cloningforthecommonman.blogspot.com/