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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

12/05/22 08:52 AM IST

Tissue Culture Plants

In News 
  • In order to boost exports of tissue culture plants, Centre, through the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), conducted a webinar on “Export Promotion of Tissue Culture Plants such as Foliage, Live Plants, Cut Flowers, and Planting Material” with Department of Biotechnology (DBT) accredited tissue culture laboratories spread across India. 
Plant Tissue culture 
  • It is culturing plant seeds, organs, explants, tissues, cells, or protoplasts on a chemically defined synthetic nutrient media under sterile and controlled conditions of light, temperature, and humidity.
Benefits 
  • Quickly produce mature plants.
  • Allows them to be moved with greatly reduced chances of transmitting diseases, pests, and pathogens.
  • Storage of genetic plant material to safeguard native plant species.
India’s exports of tissue culture plants:
  • In 2020-2021, India’s exports of tissue culture plants stood at US USD 17.17 million, with the Netherlands accounting for around 50 per cent of the shipments.
  • The top ten countries importing tissue culture plants from India are the Netherlands, USA, Italy, Australia, Canada, Japan, Kenya, Senegal, Ethiopia and Nepal.
Challenges faced by tissue culture plant laboratories
  • Increasing power costs.
  • Low efficiency levels of the skilled workforce in the laboratories.
  • Contamination issues in the laboratories.
  • Cost of transportation of micro-propagated planting material.
  • Lack of harmonization in the HS code of Indian planting material with other nations.
  • Objections raised by the forest and quarantine departments to the export of live planting material.
Source-PIB 

 

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