Tuesday 2 April 2013

Plant Tissue Culture

With the hard work of everyone in our group, the video is finally done :)



Hope you enjoyed and please leave a comment at the youtube channel
Thank you 



Plantlet hardening and establishment

Today we are going to show you what is plantlet hardening and establishment. Basically it is establishment of a plant into soil, and the objective is to understand and witness the ability of plant to adjust to extreme harsh condition in ex vitro environment in order to survive and grow.

The experiment is rather simple:

  1.  preparing the soil
  2. transfer the plant
  3. Make a mist chamber
  4. Record the growth of the plant every week 



First the soil preparation




Moisture the soil with water


We now transfer the plantlet






We can make a mist chamber by making holes on a plastic bag


Then spray water in inner surface of the plastic before covering the pot



And there we have it.


FOR MORE DETAILS ON PLANTLET HARDENING AND ESTABLISHMENT PLEASE REFER TO OUR VIDEO.




Seed culturing


Here we will be presenting what we have experienced in lab experiment of seed culturing. Well in short, seed culturing is growing the seed in-vitro by supplying everything necessary for the seed to become plant.

For your information, in-vitro is a mean of growing the sample in a test tube, culture dish, or elswhere outside the living organism. 
On other hand, by the mean of supplying everything necessary for the seed is providing nutrient requires or medium as well as other factors such as pH, temperature, mosture etc. 

But first, before we proceed to seed culturing, we need to prepare a medium (home for the seed to grow)

There are quite a few number of common medium used but to make it simple for our reader, we used MS medium because it can be use to grow general plant sample. 

How to make MS medium:

We can make MS medium by mixing Gamborg's B5 vitamin, FeNaEDTA, macronutrient and micronutrient.
However, we have to prepare this ourself


Example of the micronutrient preparation


We must weight accordingly 




Stir well by using magnetic stirrer


Upon finish, we put it into a bottle


These are the prepared component to make MS medium


We measure every volume of the component require and mix it into a beaker


Adjust the pH to 6


This is the agar powder for making the medium "hard" for the seed incubation


But first we must melt the powder by putting it into oven


Pour into the prepared flasks


Seal properly to avoid contamination


This is how the MS medium looks like

FOR MORE DETAILS ON MS MEDIUM PREPARATION PLEASE REFER TO OUR VIDEO

We can proceed to the seed culturing now


Surface sterilization of the seed samples


This is how it looks like after air dry



Carefully put the seed samples into the MS medium in a sterile condition


Seal with aluminium fold and culture it in culture room
However this is the simplified way of presenting how we conduct seed culturing

FOR MORE DETAILS IN SEED CULTURING AND THE RESULT OF SEED CULTURING PLEASE REFER TO OUR VIDEO.












Introduction to Plant Tissue Culture

In March 2013, we are lucky enough thanks to our University that providing us an opportunity to have a fieldwork laboratory experience on the subject "Cell Tissue Culture". To think that we actually able to conduct an experiment that what we learned in class is excited enough and wanted to share this joy with our fellow readers.


Some of us observing the process of seed culturing in laminar flow


Ryan doing the sterilization, bear in mind that its the crucial step before we conduct any experiment
This is to prevent any contamination to our sample


Proudly presenting our seed sample


In this lab experiment, we didn't just practice tissue culture
We got ourself a ticket to visit each part of the lab (we don't get to see this outside easily) 
Such as culture room (picture shown above), media preparation room, fermentation lab and molecular lab


Some callus sample in culture room
Callus is the dedifferentiated plant cells, we will further explain it in details in the up coming post
As for now, callus can be explained as picture below:


Callus is originate a small part of mature plant, isolated and culture with medium to induce callus formation
It is very important in plant biotechnology as it will be used as a research subject in a variety ways of plant transformation studies


The result of the seed culture: shoots that grow in-vitro
It's magical moment, I know hahahah


We got ourself some lab practice too in lab practical 5: preparing media


Some expansive nutrient in powder form


Excellent lab practice with caution is the key to successful conduct an experiment with less error and expected results.


Until then, will update more in details in the next post :)