International Aroid Society

My wife's setup involves a pressure cooker, an electronic kitchen balance that reads in grams, and a "hood" made by buying a large clear plastic bin at Wal-Mart, turning it upside down, and cutting a hole in the side and taping a clear plastic flap over it. After trying several options, she's now using regular home canning jars (with the plastic lids, not the metal ones) to hold the medium. 
We happened to already have the pressure cooker and electronic kitchen balance, but other than those, the most expensive thing has been purchasing the media, which Cathy gets from PhytoTech ( http://www.phytotechlab.com ). She's buying pre-mixed formulations they offer, which require only the addition of sugar. 
At the moment she's focused on learning to flask orchid seed efficiently, rather than tissue culture, but she has done a little TC in that kind of setup when she was teaching high school, so it can be done.

Carolina Biological ( http://www.carolina.com ) offers TC "kits" designed for teachers/students/home enthusiasts (put "tissue culture" in the search box). They won't set you up to do TC of your plants at home, but can give you a feel for the kind of lab techniques you need (and help give you the confidence that you can do it), and several of them are pretty cheap - the sundew TC kit is less than $25 US.

Sterilization of the environment in the hood is key, of course. Some people use a spray bottle of ethanol, but not only is it very "fumey", it's very flammable, so Cathy uses other options. You can use dilute bleach, or some people prefer a calcium hypochlorite (household bleach is a sodium hypochlorite solution) solution instead. Aaron Hicks, at his Orchid Seedbank Project, has lots of great advice from his experience flasking orchids which would apply in TC also. Check out http://members.cox.net/ahicks51/osp/

Steve

On Thu, 9 Sep 2010, Sherry Gates wrote:

> I excitedly 2nd this request!
>     thanks, sherry
>   ----- Original Message ----- >   From: santoury@aol.com<mailto:santoury@aol.com> >   Subject: [Aroid-l] Tissue Culture ? Can common folk do it?
> >   I'm sure this has been answered before, but nothing on the internet >   shows any "common folk" doing tissue culture work to propagate their >   own plants. I'd love to do it, if possible. Granted, my facilities are >   not "scientific." But, boy, if I could grow plants from pieces of >   leaves - I'd sure love to. I'd love to hear about any experience you >   may have had with this endeavor. Thanks! Jude

-- Steve Marak
-- samarak@gizmoworks.com
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