ABSTRACT

One of the most successful and reliable commercial applications of micropropagation has been the production of tropical foliage plants (house plants) using micropropagation (Henny et al., 1981; Chen et al., 2005). In fact, many of the foliage plants purchased in garden shops are produced using micropropagation procedures, especially shoot culture. Shoot culture is characterized by the establishment of Stage I cultures using isolated surface disinfested meristem tips, shoot tips, or lateral buds as primary explants (Chapter 12). Shoots that develop from these explants usually are rst screened (indexed; see Chapters 17 and 18) for microbial contamination. Aseptic cultures, once physiologically adapted to culture, are then subdivided into nodal or shoot tip secondary explants and transferred to a medium supplemented with a cytokinin to promote axillary shoot proliferation. The axillary shoots produced are either subcultured for repeated proliferation (Stage II) or rooted as microcuttings in vitro (Stage III) or ex vitro (Stage IV) to produce plantlets (George, 1993).