Forest Growers Research, the New Zealand organisation responsible for the planning and management of research funded by the Forest Growers Levy, has established a partnership with Scion, the Radiata Pine Breeding Company, and other industry stakeholders, to develop an automated tissue culture process.
Tissue culture refers to the process of growing plants in a nutrient-rich laboratory environment to speed up the production of small rooted plantlets.
The recently formed partnership, known as ‘Tissue Culture for the 21st Century’, is a seven-year program that aims to produce a reliable and cost-effective tissue culture process through the use of bioreactors. This kind of process would reduce the time it takes to get plants through the breeding and genomics stage, and into the forest.
When you consider genetically improved tree stocks have been found to offer value gains of between 20 and 30 per cent, the forest industry could benefit significantly if more of this type of stock was available, and sooner.
Finding ways of producing genetically improved material more quickly would help maximise returns, with a reliable and cost-effective tissue culture program being one possible means of enabling this.
