Glossary

Tissue culture

Growing plants from small pieces of tissue in sterile conditions — for cloning, for cleaning up disease, and for keeping a variety unchanged.

Tissue culture means growing plant material on a nutrient medium in sterile containers rather than in soil. A single node can be multiplied into many identical plants, which matters for a crop where a named variety has to stay the same from batch to batch.

It is also the standard route to removing disease. Taking only the very tip of the growing point, a fraction of a millimetre across, often yields material free of pathogens that had spread through the rest of the plant.

The third use is preservation: a valued line can be kept in culture, or frozen, instead of being maintained as living mother plants that age, catch disease and drift. The technique is well established in horticulture generally and has been applied to cannabis for well over a decade.

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