Tissue Culture, Have You Had Success?
Steve Marak (Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:31:49 PDT)

My wife manages it in our far - VERY far - from sterile house, with fairly
crude and inexpensive equipment (i.e., no laminar flow hood). She is
mostly flasking orchid seed now, as that's what she wanted to learn to do
first, but she has done a little trial tissue culture too since a lot of
the steps are the same. Since she had a lot of chemistry and bac-t
labs in college, and then spent 25 years teaching chemistry, she started
off with pretty good lab technique, and even so there was a learning
curve, but not what I'd call a really steep one, and she had some success
right away. It's been more about practice to refine the technique and
reduce the incidence of contamination than of having to radically change
anything, and from what we hear that's true even if you do have really
expensive equipment. (Lots of orchid people get into flasking seeds, and
most of them don't have access to labs. At least when they start.)

When she was teaching high school science classes, she even had some
students who managed it, again without high-tech equipment and in a very
dirty environment. They used really easy plants, since the purpose was
just to show the students the technique, but it worked. I had a piece of
some kalanchoe in a test tube of agar in my sunroom for a long time ...

As others have said, there's a lot of good information out there on the
web, and I like the books that have been recommended. I think there's even
a tissue-culture forum out there somewhere - I'd have to ask Cathy. If
there's interest, I can share a few sites, sources, and books that we have
found on the list, otherwise feel free to e-mail me privately.

Steve

On Thu, 9 Sep 2010, Josh Young wrote:

-- Steve Marak
-- samarak@gizmoworks.com