Lesson 3 of 12 · 7 min
Meristem culture and somatic hybrids
NCERT §10.1
In the next room, the technician peels back the leaves at the very tip of a sugarcane shoot. 'The virus is everywhere in this plant except here,' she says, pointing to a dot of tissue.
The lesson in notes
In short
Tissue culture can also recover healthy plants from diseased ones. Even in a virus-infected plant the meristem, apical and axillary, stays free of virus.
So the meristem is removed and grown in vitro to give virus-free plants. Meristems of banana, sugarcane and potato have been cultured this way.
Single plant cells can be isolated and their cell walls digested away, leaving naked protoplasts bounded only by the plasma membrane.
Protoplasts from two varieties, each with a desirable character, can be fused into hybrid protoplasts that grow into a new plant.
Such plants are somatic hybrids, and the process is somatic hybridisation.
Fusing a tomato protoplast with a potato protoplast gave the pomato. It did not combine all the desired characters, so it was not used commercially.