ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF TISSUE CULTURE

What is tissue culture?

•         In vitro culture (maintain and/or proliferate) of cells, tissues or organs

•         Types of tissue culture

▫         Organ culture

▫         Tissue culture

▫         Cell culture

Organ culture

•         The entire embryos or organs are excised from the body and culture

•         Advantages

▫         Normal physiological functions are maintained.

▫         Cells remain fully differentiated.

•         Disadvantages

▫         Scale-up is not recommended.

▫         Growth is slow.

▫         Fresh explantation is required for every experiment.

Tissue Culture

•         Fragments of excised tissue are grown in culture media

•         Advantages

▫         Some normal functions may be maintained.

▫         Better than organ culture for scale-up but not ideal.

•         Disadvantages

▫         Original organization of tissue is lost.

Cell Culture

•         Tissue from an explant is dispersed, mostly enzymatically, into a cell suspension which may then be cultured as a monolayer or suspension culture.

•         Advantages

▫         Development of a cell line over several generations

▫         Scale-up is possible

•         Disadvantages

▫         Cells may lose some differentiated characteristics.

Why do we need Cell culture?

•         Research

▫         To overcome problems in studying cellular behavior such as:

–  confounding effects of the surrounding tissues

–  variations that might arise in animals under experimental stress

▫         Reduce animal use

•         Commercial or large-scale production

▫         Production of cell material: vaccine, antibody, hormone

Cell culture application

Advantages of Cell culture

•         Advantages:

▫         Absolute control of physical environment

▫         Homogeneity of sample

▫         Less compound needed than in animal models

•         Disadvantages:

▫         Hard to maintain

▫         Only grow small amount of tissue at high cost

▫         Dedifferentiation

▫         Instability, aneuploidy

Types of Cell culture

1.     Primary Cultures

▫         Derived directly from excised tissue and cultured either as

–  Outgrowth of excised tissue in culture

–  Dissociation into single cells (by enzymatic digestion or mechanical dispersion)

▫         Advantages:

–  usually retain many of the differentiated characteristics of the cell in vivo

▫         Disadvantages:

–  initially heterogeneous but later become dominated by fibroblasts.

–  the preparation of primary cultures is labor intensive

–  can be maintained in vitro only for a limited period of time.

2.     Continuous Cultures

▫         derived from subculture (or passage, or transfer) of primary culture

–  Subculture = the process of dispersion and re-culture the cells after they have increased to occupy all of the available substrate in the culture

▫         usually comprised of a single cell type

▫         can be serially propagated in culture for several passages

▫         There are two types of continuous cultures

–  Cell lines

–  Continuous cell lines

PLANT TISSUE CULTURE

•         Plant tissue is also known as micro propagation.

it is the rapid multiplying of plant material to produce a large number of progeny plants, using the techniques of plant tissue culture methods.

•         It is a practice used for plant propagation under sterile conditions to produce plant clones

Advantages of plant tissue culture:

•         They produce exact copies of plants required that have desirable traits.

•         They produce mature plants quickly.

•         Multiple plants are produced in the absence of seeds or necessary pollinators to produce seeds.

•         Whole plants are produced regenerated from plant cells that are genetically modified.

•         Many plants that are clones of each other can be produced.

•         Diseases resistant plants are produced by micro propagation.

•         High rate of fecundity is obtained.

•         This is the only method that is viable method of regenerating genetically modified cells even after protoplast fusion.

•         This method is useful which produce seeds insufficient amounts, or when plants are sterile and they do not produce viable seeds or when the seeds cannot be stored.

•         Some plants like orchids have very small seeds and the seeds are more reliably grown from seed in sterile culture.

•         A larger number of plants can be produced and propagule can be stored for longer in a smaller area.

Disadvantages of plant Tissue Culture:

•         Micro propagation is not a method of multiplying plants.

•         It is labor intensive and expensive process.

•         A monoculture that is produced after micro propagation which leads to the lack of disease resistance, all the progeny plants may be vulnerable to the same infections.

•         An infected sample plant can produce an infected progeny. All plants cannot be successfully tissue cultured. It is usually because the medium for growth is not known.

•         Some plants are very difficult to be disinfected from fungal organisms.