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Tissue culture

For Christmas I recieved a Tissue Culture Kit and some free seeds. I was wandering if the medium for seeds is any diiferent from the cell samples. Is the plant medium listed for carnivorous plants in the manual good. And finally has any one else done this? Thanks.
 
Yes, Yes, and yes. 1/2 strength MS will work great. Use less agar than suggested or use cotton balls instead of agar. Peat moss also works as an agar substitute.

What seed varieties are you going to try? There are special requirements for the smaller ones and sterilization times vary. I can help you out with that kind of thing, let me know what you are doing.

-noah
 
VFTs, and D. capensis are very easy to TC, I think you might want to initiate capensis from a leaf cutting rather then seed though.

I never got sarracenia to work in TC, but i never tried very hard.

Andrew
 
Hi there,

As Andrew pointed out, drosera capensis can easily be done using leaf cuttings, but if you want to try seed this is how:

Take some unbleached coffee filters or some filter paper and make a seed packet. Place some seed in this and put it in a sterile bleach solution (10-20% bleach, the rest sterile water) for about two minutes, making sure all the air pockets escape so the seeds all get immersed. Then place the packet in some sterile water to rinse off the bleach, open the packet, and use very precise tweesers to remove the seeds and place them in the cultures. The small size of drosera seeds makes them hard to work with but with square-tipped tweezers it can be done.

Vft seeds are done the same way but left in the bleach solution 5-10 minutes. Sarra seeds are really hard to sterilize, but after stratification or a soaking in GA3 you will want to dip them in rubbing alcohol and then sterilize them in the bleach solution for at least 10-20 minutes. THey are very rough surfaced and so are hard to sterilize.

Hope this helps.

-noah
 
I know this may be obvious, but remember to sterilize the tweezers before handling the seeds to avoid recontaminating them.
 
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