Development of a novel automated micropropagation system for plant tissue culture

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Micropropagation is an advanced vegetative propagation technique for producing a large number of genetically uniform and pathogen-free transplants in a limited time and space. It is a plant tissue culture technique for growing plants from small pieces of tissue under sterile conditions in a laboratory on specially selected media. The benefits of plant tissue culture are extensive in the agricultural world in many respects, the first being that it allows for the production of huge numbers of plants in a very short period of time. Plant tissue culture is also advantageous to growers because the overwhelming number of disease free plants can be produced using the tissue collected from a single parent plant - a plant which itself remains unharmed in the tissue harvesting process. Propagation through tissue culture also eliminates the possibility of any interruption in the growing season because it can be carried out inside the carefully regulated controlled environment. However, plant tissue culture or micropropagation is a capital-intensive industry, and in some cases the unit cost per plant becomes unaffordable. Due to the increased cost of labour in the developed countries, the conventional micropropagation system has been challenged by high production cost and low gross profit. In general, many micropropagation companies in high cost labor areas have had to either automate their system to reduce labour requirements or move operations to low labour cost area to reduce their production cost.