I’ve fallen into the plant tissue culturing rabbit hole. I was selling excess trimmings of aquarium plants locally on Facebook marketplace and made a surprising amount of money, and my kids really enjoyed it (they got a cut for helping me out). I thought hmm, this could be a great excuse to make a little business around this, teach them some skills, get them thinking more constructively and feeling a sense of agency and ability, etc. Plus earning money is really nice when you’re a teenager.
The challenge is that in an aquarium, plants grow reasonably fast but not fast enough to sell regularly for a decent income. You need ways to produce more plants faster, more reliably, and without taking up too much space. That’s where tissue culturing comes in.
It has reaaaally sucked me in. I’m culturing everything I can find. I’m also propagating aquatic plants through more typical means, and that’s fun too. I’m out of space though.
Tissue culturing is a really fascinating science and practice. I love keeping track of the media recipes, results, growth rates, etc. I’m too early to have had meaningful results, but I look forward to tracking those as well.
This is really cool. I work in the plant industry, and most people don't know this but huge numbers of the plants bought in the U.S. are grown from tissue culture. I would guess it could be in the ballpark of half of all small and medium-sized plants (< 10" diameter), because it brings some benefits when propagating at scale for certain genera. For others, it's too difficult to grow a stable plant from tissue culture, so they need to be propagated vegetatively.
Sweet. I spent a few years cultivating mushrooms and found the hobby to be very rewarding. One can grow (legal) medicinal and gourmet mushrooms on a small scale with very little money. I recommend people interested give it a go because it's fun and offers a lot to learn. :)
Mushrooms are what gave me the confidence to try tissue culturing! I’d grown mycelium from spores, made liquid cultures, and generally figured out the sterile workflows and understood the gist of things. I figured it shouldn’t be too different or difficult.
Plants have been slightly more challenging, but not as much as I expected. If you aren’t optimizing for profits to keep a facility open, mediocre results are still awesome and you’ve got plenty of time to keep experimenting. I guess it’s much the same with mushrooms. If you don’t get 5 pounds on your first flush, it’s still great fun. The beauty of mycelium is that turn around times are an order of magnitude shorter. Tissue cultures are very, very slow.
I have a background in absolutely nothing. Anyone can do this stuff.
I mentioned in another comment, the book “Plants from Test Tubes: An Introduction to Micro-Propagation” was incredibly helpful to me. You can get a cursory understanding of things from YouTube or similar, but the book does a great job of explaining what you’re actually doing, how, and why.
A good place to start is prepping some media and containers, collecting some plant tissues, sterilizing it, and dropping it into the media in the container! I know each step here is a subject within itself, but it really is this simple when you zoom out a bit. If you aren’t sure about how to make MS media, start with pre-made options from a company like Plant Cell Technologies. You can use glass jars with autoclaveable plastic lids as the containers. You can use a pressure cooker as your autoclave. Collecting the plant material can be simple or extremely difficult (collecting meristem material can be excruciating if you haven’t worked under a microscope before), and it’s fine to start simple (just use a piece of a leaf). You’ll want a flow hood or still air box, and you can make these for peanuts or buy small solutions for pretty reasonable prices.
As someone once told me: There’s nothin to do but to do it
Thank you for that; I appreciate you taking the time to post that. You've inspired me.
> You’ll want a flow hood or still air box
This was what I was going to ask next. I live in the middle of the Pacific ocean so shipping large things here is prohibitively expensive (for a hobby project) so I guess I'll have to make one. I'll do some googling.
I started with “Plants from Test Tubes: An Introduction to Micro-Propagation”. After reading that I’ve perused various sites, YouTube, and I find research papers are remarkably plentiful and useful when you’ve got a specific question.
For example, I want to culture some plant. How do I get the best tissue from the plant and which media and hormones seem to work best? Should I use agar, gellan, multiply in a temporary immersion bioreactor, are there any special deflasking notes, etc. The information is out there for a ton of species!
The challenge is that in an aquarium, plants grow reasonably fast but not fast enough to sell regularly for a decent income. You need ways to produce more plants faster, more reliably, and without taking up too much space. That’s where tissue culturing comes in.
It has reaaaally sucked me in. I’m culturing everything I can find. I’m also propagating aquatic plants through more typical means, and that’s fun too. I’m out of space though.
Tissue culturing is a really fascinating science and practice. I love keeping track of the media recipes, results, growth rates, etc. I’m too early to have had meaningful results, but I look forward to tracking those as well.