Chapter II 



THE HISTORY OF PLANT TISSUE 

 CULTURE 



The science of plant tissue cultures has had a 

 long but tenuous history. It would be difficult to 

 assign an exact date for the "first step" in its 

 development. Certainly, as we have seen, the 

 idea of cultivating fragments of plants was im- 

 plicit in much that was done in the 19th century. 

 Rechinger, in 1893, 108, seems to have been the 

 first to investigate experimentally the "minimum 

 limit" of divisibility of plant parts, using isolated 

 buds of Populus nigra, Fraxinus Ornus, roots of 

 Beta vulgaris, Brassica rapa, sections of stems of 

 Pothos celatocaulis, Coleus arifolia, and many 

 other materials. He concluded that pieces less 

 than 20 mm. thick would only rarely regenerate 

 entire plants and that some vascular tissue must 

 be included in the fragments cultivated. But in 

 this work he used no nutrient solutions, "grow- 

 ing" his cultures on sand moistened with tap 

 water. These were scarcely "tissue cultures" in 

 any real sense. 



