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Tissue Culture & Somatic Hybridization MCQ - Practice Questions with Answers

Edited By admin | Updated on Sep 18, 2023 18:34 AM | #NEET

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  • Tissue Culture & Somatic Hybridization is considered one of the most asked concept.

  • 2 Questions around this concept.

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Tissue Culture & Somatic Hybridization
  • Tissue culture is the method of ‘in vitro’ culture of plant or animal cells, tissue or organ – on nutrient medium under aseptic conditions usually in a glass container.
  • It was learnt by scientists, during the 1950s, that whole plants could be regenerated from explants, i.e., any part of a plant taken out and grown in a test tube, under sterile conditions in special nutrient media. 
  • This capacity to generate a whole plant from any cell/explant is called totipotency.
  • It is important to stress here that the nutrient medium must provide a carbon source such as sucrose and also inorganic salts, vitamins, amino acids and growth regulators like auxins, cytokinins etc. 
  • By application of these methods it is possible to achieve propagation of a large number of plants in very short durations. 
  • This method of producing thousands of plants through tissue culture is called micropropagation.
  • Each of these plants will be genetically identical to the original plant from which they were grown, i.e., they are somaclones.
  • Another important application of the method is the recovery of healthy plants from diseased plants. 
  • Although the plant is infected with a virus, the meristem (apical and axillary) is free of virus. 
  • Hence, one can remove the meristem and grow it in vitro to obtain virus-free plants. Scientists have succeeded in culturing meristems of banana, sugarcane, potato, etc.

Somatic Hybridization:

  • Single cells can be isolated from plants and after digesting their cell walls to produce naked protoplasts (surrounded by plasma membranes). 
  • Isolated protoplasts from two different varieties of plants – each having a desirable character – can be fused to get hybrid protoplasts, which can be further grown to form a new plant. 
  • These hybrids are called somatic hybrids while the process is called somatic hybridisation.

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