Micropropagation studies on Bacopa Monnieri, Nerium Oleander and Bioreactor studies on micropropagation of dendrobium, an orchid

Abstract

Orchids are an excellent item for garden and for indoor decoration. They exhibit a wide range of diversity in form, size, color and texture of flowers beyond the imagination of human mind (Mukherjee, 1983). Orchids have been cultivated over past 200 years for their beautiful flowers. They belong to one of the largest families of plants on earth. Several orchids have been used as food in different parts of the world (Bose and Bhattacharjee,1999). Orchids grow in nature through seeds but in absence of appropriate hosts they don t germinate in adequate numbers, so it remains as a rare species For appropriate germination of orchid seeds, in vitro propagation is imperative for multiplication rather than in vivo (Arditti,1979). Clonal propagation of plants is often difficult, expensive and unsuccessful. Clonal propagation through tissue culture popularly called Micropropagation . A number of hybrids of commercial importance are routinely propagated by tissue culture methods. Use of plant tissue culture for micropropagation was initiated and he found commercially viable approach for orchid propagation. Commercial in vitro propagation of plants is done essentially by agar based media. Though this procedure has advantages over conventional means of muliplicaton in terms of cost and labour. This aspect obviously lead to vigorous search for less labour and cost effective process. Use of bioreactors wherein cultures can be maintained in precisely controlled conditions with higher culture volumes has been the natural choice for adaptation since they have been utilized for culturing plant cells and aggregates for the production of secondary metabolites. Physical and chemical culture conditions are crucial in large scale micropropagation of clonally propagated plant species. ii The use of bioreactors for plant multiplication is a novel and developing technology. Realization of the potential of bioreactors for the plant multiplications have led to demonstrations with an increasing number of plant systems.