Tissue culture.

Plant tissue culture (micropropagation) is the aseptic culture of cells, tissues, organs and their components under controlled conditions in vitro where the environment and nutrition are rigidly controlled. While tissue culture is the most commonly applied and widely recognised term for this process, micropropagation, in vitro culture, sterile culture and axenic culture may also be used (Smith, 2013). Tissue culture has developed to the point where it has become an important tool in both basic and applied studies, as well as in commercial application and large scale plant production (Thorpe, 2007). The first attempts at culturing isolated plant cells in vitro on artificial medium were carried out by the German scientist, Gottlieb Haberlandt in 1902 (Krikorian and Berquam, 1969). While these early experiments were unsuccessful, Haberlandt proposed and established the new concept of 'totipotency' - the potential of a plant cell to grow and develop into a whole new multicellular plant via differentiation of a single cell into many other cell types. Thus Haberlandt is justifiably recognised as the father of plant tissue culture (Thorpe, 2007). By 1922 further studies by Robbins and Kottle had established short-term cultures of isolated root tips. By 1934 other researchers began to build on this process and maintained indefinite culture of tomato root tips (White, 1934). During the 1930s and 1940s more important findings added to the initial process of cell culturing with the first long-term plant tissue culture of callus from explants of cambial tissue isolated from carrot carried out by Gautheret and Nobecourt. This was followed by callus culture of tobacco tumour tissue which was induced to differentiate into roots and shoots (White, 1939).