Nutrient supply and growth of plants in culture

Abstract

A nutrient medium for tissue culture usually consists of inorganic salts, a carbon source, some vitamins and growth regulators. In many cases a gelling agent is added. The formulation of the nutrient medium remains an important part of the development for all applications of plant tissue culture. The most used media for tissue culture is still that of Murashige and Skoog [16] or modifications from this formulation. It is now thirty years since they published their historical paper ‘A revised medium for rapid growth and bioassays with tobacco tissue cultures’. It remains difficult to evaluate the impact of this paper on the development of in vitro culture; the medium they proposed, known by everybody as MS-medium, has proven to be satisfactory for the tissue culture of many plant species for micropropagation purposes and has undoubtedly been used more than any other for plant tissue culture work [6]. In 1981 Evans et al. [3] stated that the MS-medium is used in 70% of the protocols for the induction of somatic embryogenesis, and there is no reason to believe it is less for other applications of tissue culture or that it has decreased with time. It was therefore not surprising that this paper was discussed in Current Contents as one of the citation classics; it was the first plant paper which reached this status.