• Plant tissue culture (PTC) refers to the cultivation of undifferentiated mass of plant cells, tissues or organs on artificial media under aseptic and controlled environmental conditions.
• Any plant organ like leaf, apical meristem, embryo, cotyledon, hypocotyl, etc., can be used as an explant and whole plants can be regenerated in vitro.
• Plant tissue culture media used for in vitro cultures is mainly composed of inorganic and organic supplements, carbon source, plant growth hormones, vitamins, gelling agents, antibiotics, etc.
• Tissue culture can be categorised as organ culture, explant culture, callus culture, cell suspension culture, protoplast culture or single cell culture.
• Plant tissue culture is routinely used for several applications in plant science, such as in micropropagation, synthetic seed formation, protoplast culture, haploid or triploid culture, virus free plants production, secondary metabolites production, etc.
• Plant growth hormones play a vital role in plant tissue culture especially, different ratios of auxin and cytokinin are employed for either root or shoot regeneration depending upon the need or objective.
• Somatic hybridisation in plant tissue culture can be exploited to produce distantly related plants as well.
• Cultured cells or tissues may accumulate a higher concentration of secondary metabolites than its parents, under optimum environmental and nutritional conditions.
• Several compounds of industrial importance have been successfully produced in tissue culture, like taxol, azadirachtin, shikonin.
