History of Plant Tissue Culture

The theoretical basis for plant tissue culture was proposed by Gottlieb Haberlandt in his address to the German Academy of Science in 1902 on his experiments on the culture of single cells (2). He opioned that, to my knowledge, no systematically organized attempts to culture isolated vegetative cells from higher plants have been made. Yet the results of such culture experiments should give some interesting insight to the properties and potentialities that the cell, as an elementary organism, possesses. Moreover, it would provide information about the interrelationships and complementary influences to which cells within a multi cellular whole organism are exposed (from the English translation, [3]). He experimented with isolated photosynthetic leaf cells and other functionally differentiated cells and was unsuccessful, but nevertheless he predicted that one could successfully cultivate artificial embryos from vegetative cells. He, thus, clearly established the concept of totipotency, and further indicated that the technique of cultivating isolated plant cells in nutrient solution permits the investigation of important problems from a new experimental approach. On the basis of that 1902 address and
his pioneering experimentation before and later, Haberlandt is justifiably recognized as the father of plant tissue culture. Other studies led to the culture of isolated root tips(4, 5 ). This approach of using explants with meristematic cells produced the successful and indefinite culture of tomato root tips(6). Further work allowed for root culture on a completely defined medium. Such root cultures were used initially for viral studies and later as a major tool for physiological studies (7). Success was also achieved with bud cultures(8, 9).

Embryo culture also had its beginning early in the first decade of the last century with barley embryos
(10). This was followed by the successful rescue of embryos from nonviable seeds of a cross between
Linum perenne ↔ Linum austriacum (11), and for full embryo development in some early-ripening species of fruit trees(12); thus providing one of the earliest applications of in vitro culture. The phenomenon of precocious germination was also encountered(13).

The first true plant tissue cultures were obtained by Gautheret (14,15) from cambial tissue of Acer pseudoplatanus. He also obtained success with similar explants of Ulmus campestre, Robinia pseudoacacia, and Salix capraea using agar-solidified medium of Knop’s solution, glucose and cysteine hydro chloride. Later, the availability of indole acetic acid and the addition of B vitamins allowed for the more or less simultaneous demonstrations with carrot root tissues(16,17), and with tumor tissue of a Nicotiana glauca ↔ Nicotiana langsdorffii hybrid (18), which did not require auxin, that tissues could be continuously grown in culture; and even made to differentiate roots and shoots (19, 20). However, all of the initial explants used by these pioneers included meristematic tissue. Nevertheless, these findings set the stage for the dramatic increase in the use of in vitro cultures in the subsequent decades. Greater detail on the early pioneering events in plant tissue culture can be found in White (21), Bhojwani and Razdan (22), and Gautheret (23). This current article is based on an earlier review by the author (24)(used with permission from Elsevier).

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