Tissue culture is hot again, but it's nothing new. So why should you care? In this video, I make the case for the importance of tissue culture in the cannabis industry and in general. Who cares? You, now that you've seen it. Links: Plant Tissue Culture by Mohammad Anis and Naseem Ahmad https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309039773_Plant_Tissue_Culture_Propagation_Conservation_and_Crop_Improvement Cannabis Tissue Culture by Bret Kavanaugh https://medium.com/cannabis-crash-course/living-documents-cannabis-tissue-culture-14076b26b2e2 TRANSCRIPT: Everyone in the cannabis industry is suddenly talking about tissue culture—including me. Hell, I made a whole video about it. And you know what? I never mentioned what the point is. Tissue culturing is a specialized skill that requires expensive equipment. And yet, propagating a cannabis plant is as easy as snipping off a stem and sticking it in a cup full of dirt. So why do we bother spending all this money for the same outcome? [title card] What’s the Point? [title card] Space Savers Tissue culturing allows you to propagate in far less space than traditional agriculture — square feet, rather than acres. It’s much less resource-intensive in other ways, as well. Instead of growing many plants from seed, you can use one plant to make many smaller plants for cultivation, allowing you to propagate in far higher numbers. For the cannabis industry, being able to cut down on the plant material used to propagate is important, because those mother plants are not cheap. [title card] Disease Freeze Tissue Culturing is also a way to grow plants that are free of viruses. You might have heard about Hop Latent Viroid—it’s a virus-like disease that’s really difficult to eradicate, because a viroid is a simpler structure than a virus and can live inside your cannabis plants. It won’t kill them, but cannabis plants that have the Hop Latent Viroid may grow stunted, and they’ll produce a lot less flower than a healthy plant. For anyone trying to make money in this industry, the Hop Latent viroid can be absolutely devastating. Tissue culturing allows us to take the tiny parts of the plant that can’t contain a viroid and use those to grow healthy plants. You can also heat-treat micropropagated plants if you want to make sure those diseases are really gone. If you did that to a mature plant, you would kill it. [title card] Good genes Tissue culture micropropagation is also the best way to propagate a really high-quality plant. Instead of hacking off a bunch of good material that’s about to flower, you can take a little bit off and use that to create a few clones. It’s way more efficient. [title card] Support your Local Library Tissue culture is also a great way to keep certain genetics or good phenotypes “on file”, so to speak. You can keep little plantlets in sterile containers and hold on to them for a long time, and whenever someone wants to go ahead and grow one, they’ll be ready. The criminalization of marijuana and hemp has led to the loss of some incredible strains, but with the power of tissue culture, we can began to build up our libraries. [title card] Additional Notes Tissue culturing isn’t just for the cannabis industry. Cavendish bananas are actually only able to be propagated through tissue culture, for example. There are some other plants that can benefit. There are some native plants that don’t produce very good seedstock, so even though you can plant their seeds, most of them won’t grow. There are also some grasses that are natural hybrids and don’t produce seeds at all. Some of them are native, ecologically important plants that have to be reintroduced to their original environment in order to preserve the ecosystem. When nurseries begin propagating these plants, they need a lot of them, and tissue culturing works great for that. [title card] Drawbacks Don’t get me wrong, tissue culture micropropagation isn’t a perfect solution. Any plant that’s grown in a lab is more vulnerable to pest damage in the outside world, and tissue culturing can cause acclimation problems and poor rooting ability. Still, it’s one of the best tools we have, and that’s why we pay for all this fancy equipment and do all these fiddly things with scalpels and tweezers and agar mediums. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions about tissue culture or micropropagation in general, let me know in the comments so I can address that. Big thanks to the Plant Biotechnology Laboratory at Aligarh Muslim University, and especially Mohammad Anis and Naseem Ahmad. Their book on Plant Tissue Culture is one of the best, in my opinion. I’d also like to thank myself for previously writing a pretty good article on tissue culture that did cover a lot of these points. Bret, you killed it. I’ve posted links to Mohammad Anis’s book and my article in the description. I hope you enjoy them. Have a good one!