Plant Tissue Culture as a Means to Reduce Carbon Footprint
Multiplication of plants through tissue culture is a common practice nowadays. It generally refers to regeneration of plants under laboratory conditions on suitable media for different purposes.
Regeneration through a callus phase can result in somaclones which are genetically different from the parental types and can be used to obtain superior crop cultivars.
On the other hand growing apical meristem explants of plants on culture media will generate plants which will be genetically identical to the parental type . This technique referred to as meristem culture is used to rapidly multiply planting material in many crops. In addition meristem culture has other advantages such as producing pest and disease free planting material and significant savings by reducing the need for resources such as land, labour and capital.
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However one more major factor in favour of using meristem culture for plant multiplication is possible energy saving. Traditional plant multiplication methods involve raising nursery crops either in fields or green houses. This requires high energy input operations such as land preparation ( using machinery, consuming fossil fuels), irrigation ( consuming electricity), weed control, pest and disease management measures, fertiliser application etc. All these consume significant amounts of energy, and under Indian conditions the bulk of the energy produced is through use of non-renewable fossil fuels. The thermal power plants mostly depend on coal or petroleum-based fuels to generate electricity.
For the tissue culture facilities the energy needed is mostly for sterilisation of glassware and media and to illuminate the culture chambers as well as to reduce the temperature whenever required. Modern design technology enables construction of facilities suitably for maximum utilisation of natural sunlight and ventilation to markedly reduce energy needs for illumination and temperature control.
Banana Tissue Culture at Mevedir Toppa Biotechnology Lab in Gangtok.
Presently meristem culture is being used on a limited scale in crops such as sugarcane and bananas and some plantation and horticultural crops. Its large scale adoption for many other crops and plants will contribute much to reduce the energy needed to multiply planting material. Another very important potential use of meristem culture is the mass multiplication of saplings of trees for large scale afforestation programmes. Since rapidly increasing the forest cover in the country is an urgent imperative, meristem culture of these trees would be a great advantage. Although some institutions have started using the technique, its large scale adoption is very much essential.
Conventional methods of multiplying tree saplings is rather slow and quite resource intensive. The rapid multiplication of the saplings through tissue ( meristem) culture and the resultant large scale afforestation are bound to significantly reduce our overall carbon footprint, in view of the remarkable capacity of vegetation to neutralise the harmful effects of increased carbon emissions.
