Anthurium Propagation Through Tissue Culture

By Zeke Morganstern


Ever thought about how anthurium growers cultivate scores of anthurium blossoms every year? Well the answer is easy, they raise them upon millions of plants. But how do they get these countless plants in very first place? Their magic formula is a method known as tissue culture. Tissue culture is simply put: a procedure used for cloning plants. This is why every anthurium of a given variety looks so comparable; they're genetically identical clones.

The tissue culture procedure commences with the farmer selecting the very best, most beautiful anthurium that he can uncover. Selecting the very best possible flower is essential since simply no one wants a million clones of rubbish. If the cultivator is going to invest enough time and money to produce a million copies, you can be positive that he wants to uncover the best possible flower to duplicate. After this valuable plant is picked out, the cultivator takes it to a lab.

At the laboratory, a technician first checks that the specimen is free of disease and then cuts off a small piece of it. He will then sterilize the sample and put it into a beaker that contains an agar based medium that's primed with special plant hormones which trigger the specimen to create a callus, which is an undifferentiated mass of tissue.

The callus is divided into numerous portions and then permitted to develop again. This method is replicated several times. When enough plant material is produced, the calluses are transplanted to growing media which contains a different set of plant hormones that cause the undifferentiated tissues to turn into roots and shoots. This causes numerous baby plants to sprout from each callus.

After the baby plants have become large enough, they are transplanted into fresh beakers to grow further. As soon as they have achieved a size where they will survive in open air, they are taken out of the beakers and replanted into bigger planting pots. For a short time, these fresh plants are permitted to grow in the manipulated conditions of a plant nursery. After they have grown large enough and adapted to developing inside the open air, they are delivered to the farm and planted within the fields at the farm.




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