Reference no: EM133628403

Question

Many tropical plants from the orchid family are highly prized for their spectacular flowers. Propagating such plants can be highly profitable. The traditional method for propagation has been to grow a plant until it is large enough to divide into several smaller divisions. This is a slow process, however, and modern growers now employ sophisticated cell culture techniques to generate large numbers of cloned plants. Cloning begins by isolating meristem cells and propagating those cells in pure tissue culture in laboratory conditions. When the growth of plantlets from tissue culture is compared to the growth of new plants taken by division of the same parent, the tissue culture plants typically grow very poorly. What could cause this disparity? Some of the tissue-cultured cells were not from meristems. The meristem cells lack the complete genome. The plants from divisions are not infected with fungi. The tissue-cultured plants lack mycorrhizal fungi.