Biochemical organization of plant cell and tissue
Answers
The origin of plant cell and tissue culture as a technique can be traced back to the early days of plant developmental biology, when the German botanist Haberlandt in the first two decades of this century tried to understand plant development and to experimentally prove his hypothesis of plant cell totipotency (Haberlandt, 1902). His attempts to develop a methodology for obtaining controlled growth of excised plant tissues failed because of the limited knowledge of the nutritional and hormonal requirements of plant tissues and cells grown under aseptic conditions during his era, but today a vast amount of literature on in vitro regeneration is available. All these reports clearly show that many plant cells indeed possess the unique character of totipotency. The first scientist to grow plant tissues in vitro was P. R. White, who had kept tomato roots in a liquid medium since 1934 (cited in Chaleff, 1980). A great step forward in understanding plant development was made after elucidation of the role that phytohormones play in controlling tissue culture techniques. The role of auxips and cytokinins as the key factors for triggering either cell proliferation (callus formation and cell suspensions) or root and shoot development was elucidated by the elegant work of Skoog and co-workers in 1950 in tobacco (cited in Skoog, 1971).