Articles
AN OVERVIEW OF COMMERCIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS TO MARKETING OF MICROPROPAGATED PLANTS
The size of the market has not changed significantly in the last decade, despite several technological and scientific achievements in the field of plant tissue culture.
The recent developments in genetic engineering and in conventional breeding should have created a significant widening of the volume of sales, since these technologies rely heavily on in vitro culture.
What are the major limitations to the commercialization of plant tissue culture technology? The high cost of micropropagated plants comprises the major limiting factor.
The cost stems from high labor requirement, expensive facilities and energy, and loss due to technological problems i.e. high mutation rates, microbial contamination and acclimatization difficulties.
The high cost of labor could be reduced by automation and mechanization of some of the activities involved in micropropagation.
Unfortunately to date none of the automated systems which have been developed were useful to a wide range of crops and the investments required are vast.
The use of photoautotrophic culture may solve the requirements of expensive clean room technology.
This technique, although initiated almost a decade ago (Kozai, et al., 1987), is still at its infancy.
Solutions for the detection of somaclonal variants seem more possible today with the advancements of new molecular tools.