Hi! I have been reading a bit about the practice of “micropropagation” for cannabis plants. Am I understanding it correctly by thinking that you can take a leaf cutting and grow a plant from that? Are they starting with miniature clones, or stems, or literally just any piece of plant matter? How long does it take from start to plant? Are you able to store these tissue culture plants for long periods without them growing ?
Any information would be wonderful. It looks like a great advantage to be able to keep your genetics in clone form on a shelf until you needed them. Teach me plz!
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I’ve just recently learned about this as well I will probably never use it although it is really neat… started along time ago with orchid growers haha… yeah you can use any part of the plant even just a single cell from a plant will work with the right chemicals involved, it would be cool to try but I see it extremely useful for large grow ops thousands of acres of green where you have to start hundreds if not thousands of seedlings a day to keep the process going or have a mass amount of space for a ton of mother plants instead you could take 3 fan leafs off or branches as if you would clone break it down into thousands of clones since you only need a single cell to clone from… I would imagine shelf life would be only until that cell or plant material dies so depends on how long you can keep it alive ide imagine a long time! I don’t know much about it at all but really cool subject I’m following and would love to learn more!
Hi hope this helps I’ve been reading a few articles aimed at tissue culture and preserving plant genetics over long periods of time
This is also a helpful article The Future of Cannabis Cloning - Tissue Culture - Plant Cell Technology | Your partner in plant tissue culture
The beauty of TC is that unlike conventional methods, it lets cultivators preserve a living specimen, almost perpetually, through minimal effort and using minimal space. Small pieces of plant tissue, even just a few cells, from cannabis specimens can eventually produce hundreds of identical clones.
All tissue cultures start life as a small cutting from a sample. The tissue sample is trimmed and goes through a crucial sterilization process. Once cleaned, the plant tissue goes in a dense nutrient culture which is typically an agar gel containing a carefully crafted nutrient, hormone and sugar mixture. The tissue culture controls the sample. Different hormone mixtures will trigger various stages of development for the tiny culture.
The culture can technically remain in a period of indefinite purgatory, until a time when the grower wishes to work with the sample again. Through the introduction of new hormones and nutrient-rich growing solutions, a cultivator can trigger growth, root development, and multiplication. When the plant is large enough to multiply, it is ready to be trimmed into literally hundreds of separate yet precisely cloned individuals.
These hundreds of samples follow a similar course until they are large enough to enter into a phase of hardening off and ready for planting. From one small tissue sample, a well-organized cultivator can potentially create hundreds of perfect clones, without any contamination from the mother.
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@Teffygreenthumb from what i understand it allows you to keep clones virtually frozen for long periods of time in small containers so you can keep genetics on hand without needing a mother plant. The process takes a lot longer then regular cloning/seedlings I believe. I am interested in how it can regenerate the plants without any diseases they may have been carrying
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