• Preparation of a DNA sample in the laboratory
    Cell and Tissue Culture

Cell and tissue culture

Overview

In a nutshell
Using individual plant cells, entire plants are regenerated on growth media in the lab.

Advantages
Quickly generate many identical offspring of one plant.

Disadvantages
Any crop and tissue type requires its own “recipe”.

Development
Since the beginning of the 20th century. Practical use from the 1970s onwards.

Application at KWS
Cultivation of sugarbeets, maize, rapeseed, wheat, barley and rye.

Plants have a special feature that distinguishes them from many other creatures: They are totipotent. In principle, each individual plant cell can regenerate an entire plant. This involves taking tissue fragments or individual cells from a plant and putting these on special growth media in the lab, where the cells can grow and divide further. Eventually, an entire plant can be regenerated from the lab-grown tissue.

This allows us to very quickly generate genetically identical offspring from one plant in the lab. However, different crops and tissue types require specific procedures attuned to them.

KWS has built up a lot of experience in this area over the decades. Cell and tissue cultures form the basis for many biotechnology applications and analyses at KWS. Especially valuable is the method to create double haploid lines in hybrid breeding (DH lines). But cell and tissue cultures also play an important part in the genetic transformation of plants.

An overview of our breeding methods

Your contact

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Stephan Krings
Head of Global Marketing and Communications
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