Re: Tissue Culture ? Can common folk do it?

**E* <S*@ExoticRainforest.com>**

I seem to recall that Steve Lucas mentioned to me that Tony Avent had written an article for the IAS journal on growing Amorphophallus plants from leaf cuttings.  Does anyone know the issue number?  

Nancy Greig
Director, Cockrell Butterfly Center
Houston Museum of Natural Science
One Hermann Circle Drive
Houston, TX  77030-1799

tel 713-639-4742
fax 713-639-4788
www.hmns.org

-----Original Message-----
From: aroid-l-bounces@www.gizmoworks.com on behalf of s*@aol.com
Sent: Sat 9/11/2010 4:01 PM
To: aroid-l@www.gizmoworks.com
Subject: Re: [Aroid-l] Tissue Culture ? Can common folk do it?

Hey there
Thank you very much - Here I was thinking, hoping, that it would just be a matter of cutting up some leaves, and putting them on agar... The whole spraying, chemicals and such  -  no thanks! Darn. One could only hope, right? :) 

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Marak samarak@gizmoworks.com
To: Discussion of aroids aroid-l@www.gizmoworks.com
Sent: Sat, Sep 11, 2010 1:29 pm
Subject: Re: [Aroid-l] Tissue Culture ? Can common folk do it?

My wife's setup involves a pressure cooker, an electronic kitchen balance 
that reads in grams, and a "hood" made by buying a large clear plastic bin 
at Wal-Mart, turning it upside down, and cutting a hole in the side and 
taping a clear plastic flap over it. After trying several options, she's 
now using regular home canning jars (with the plastic lids, not the metal 
ones) to hold the medium. 

We happened to already have the pressure cooker and electronic kitchen 
balance, but other than those, the most expensive thing has been 
purchasing the media, which Cathy gets from PhytoTech ( 
http://www.phytotechlab.com ). She's buying pre-mixed formulations they 
offer, which require only the addition of sugar. 

At the moment she's focused on learning to flask orchid seed efficiently, 
rather than tissue culture, but she has done a little TC in that kind of 
setup when she was teaching high school, so it can be done.

Carolina Biological ( http://www.carolina.com ) offers TC "kits" designed 
for teachers/students/home enthusiasts (put "tissue culture" in the search 
box). They won't set you up to do TC of your plants at home, but can give 
you a feel for the kind of lab techniques you need (and help give you the 
confidence that you can do it), and several of them are pretty cheap - the 
sundew TC kit is less than $25 US.

Sterilization of the environment in the hood is key, of course. Some 
people use a spray bottle of ethanol, but not only is it very "fumey", 
it's very flammable, so Cathy uses other options. You can use dilute 
bleach, or some people prefer a calcium hypochlorite (household bleach is 
a sodium hypochlorite solution) solution instead. Aaron Hicks, at his 
Orchid Seedbank Project, has lots of great advice from his experience 
flasking orchids which would apply in TC also. Check out 
http://members.cox.net/ahicks51/osp/

Steve

On Thu, 9 Sep 2010, Sherry Gates wrote: