Plant Tissue Culture

Unorthrodox model in Commercial Micropropagation

A new, advanced and efficient model

• Commercial micropropagation aims at achievement of large scale propagation of plants in sterile medium in sterile containers. Basic requirement to successfully achieve this is to prevent growth of microbial contamination in the culture.

• This by no means easy when millions of cultures are required to be produced.

The approach used to prevent culture contamination

makes all the difference between

old conventional model and our new advanced model

Most of the present models rely heavily on:

• clean air areas. facility under positive pressure and air handling systems

• central air conditioning to maintain temperature control in Culture Incubation Rooms and special construction designes to ensure thermal insulation

• Providing for racks to store and incubate cultures and artificial lighting system

• Use of expensive glassware/plasticware as culture containers

• Providing for expensive flooring and several other expensive equipment which are supposed to be absolutely essential part of the Technology.

All this, unquestionably needs huge capital costs. In addition, all these equipment consume high quantum of energy. No wonder, with reference to this widely known and widely used model, commercial micropropagation is quite correctly perceived as a wonderful, exciting but very expensive proposition.

By conservative estimates, the old model costs,

for annual installed capacity of 5 million plants,

capital cost of Rs. 35 million (About 0.8 million US $)

with a conservative estimate of

cost of production of Rs. 5 - 12 (0.11 to 0.27 US $) per plant

depending on plant species.

However

Experience of most of the established ventures tells that despite so much of expenditure,

trouble free operation is rarely achieved.

Things have changed radically, however,

after our rethinking which started about 12 years ago

• We found that the energy guzzling equipment contributed highest cost factor. This environment control engineering is not necessary if principles of Bioprocess Engineering are used. Centralized air conditioning, artificial lighting, clean air quality in culture incubation room are no longer necessary for large scale culture production. The cultures can be incubated in simple fan and pad green house in diffuse NATURAL LIGHT in ambient air quality.

Use of Bioprocess Engineering principles is not as simple as just starting incubating cultures in open environment, nor is it an overnight success.

As soon as you expose cultures to the source of natural illumination, several problems are encountered. Major problems being:

• Rise in temperature
• Rise in risk of contamination of all types
• Rapid loss of moisture from cultures leading to drying out

Circumventing these problems was not obviously an overnight success, much less a cake walk. Years of R&D has gone into devising methods to circumvent these problems in large scale production and generate an easy to operate know-how. This package of meticulously standardised practices constitutes our

New Model of Commercial Micropropagation

• This has already been validated by successful production of hundreds of thousands of cultures in regular production programmes in commercial facilities having 10 clean workstations.

• This model is, now set to change perspectives of global micropropagation business.

• and is now available from us for a modest know-how fees.

SALIENT FEATURES OF NEW MODEL

• Our new, advanced model, due to all the reasons elaborated above, needs least modification of ambient environment in Tropical and Sub-Tropical countries. Culture room can be as simple as a polyhouse, with a fan and pad arrangement at some places. This obviously means far less capital as well as running expense and produces far more sturdy plants of better quality because it is produced in environment which is much nearer to its natural environment in which it is supposed to perform in the field.

  Simple culture incubation facilities of various scales: producing high quality plants on large scale

  	Click on the pictures for notes and blow-up No artificial lights Natural light as light source No air conditioning No Class 10,000 air area Least or no culture racks Simple/no flooring It can be a Greenhouse too
  	Result Semi-hardened, green, and sturdy plants

•  
• Same reasons make it possible to introduce innovative use of suitably pretreated polybags as culture containers for production instead of vessels made of glass or plastic. This measure opens scope for adopting several measures which lead to increase in process efficiency leading to cost reduction.

• We further increased the efficiency of the system by devising special handling techniques which lead to phenomenal increase in throughput from the Laminar Clean Air Flow workstations.

• A very important additional collective result of all above steps is that the plants developed in this system are already semi hardened. Their need for protection against desiccation in primary hardening phase is limited to much shorter time. After a brief period of protection, they can be further hardened in direct sunlight and best possible degree of hardening is achieved.

Better efficiency in Hardening of plants

Cick on the pictures for notes and blow-up Need protection for only a small period Can be subjected to full sun-hardening

• Quality Control Tests

• is an additional package available from us under our consultancy, independent of whether you do or do not choose to adopt our model. This package envisages methods based on cytology, comparative vegetative anatomy, microbiology and DNA based diagnostic Molecular Biological methods to ascertain various quality attributes for in-house quality control as well as for third party based Quality Assurance Systems.

  These tests will serve two important purposes. First of all, producer will be able to control his own production quantitatively as well as qualitatively on direct scientific standards. Secondly, consumers will know on what to rely upon. This will lend firm foundation on which consumer confidence and legitimacy of the trade can be based, both in domestic as well as international markets.

  We strongly recommend adoption of this package also in conjunction of our model. Expenditure on sophisticated quality control systems is more rational than expenditure on environment control. Use of such systems in Commercial Micropropagation industry is a rarity.

  It is obvious that capital cost as well as running cost of such a unit will be phenomenally low. This will change the entire perception of global micropropagation business as well as applications.

  How much low will it be indeed?

• That will depend on several locational factors

  We would help you work it out on case to case basis

  Send your querries with all relevent details

  Preliminary interactions are free

Do not saddle yourselves as well as your customers with huge extra cost which is not useful to both of you.

Also, do not waste time and get tempted to reinvent the wheel on your own.

We offer the know-how on a modest consultancy fee which is much less than what you will spend for standardising it independently yourselves, with additional expense of few years and at loss of opportunities that an early bird can muster in global competitiveness and leadership in the business.

Acquire our know-how today, take an unbeatable lead in Global Micropropagation business and maintain it by resorting to continuous improvement through R&D.

Acquire a rare combination of

Process Efficiency, Cost Effectiveness and Quality Attributes

For more detailed discussion, click on following article:

New Perspective in Commercial Micropropagation

E-mail: info@tissuecon.com