Tissue Culture vs. Cuttings — When to Move to a Lab
The real trade-offs between traditional cuttings and micropropagation — multiplication rate, footprint, contamination risk, and cost — plus the stages of a TC pipeline and the economic break-even that tells you when a clean-stock lab pays for itself.
Two ways to copy a plant
Both cuttings and tissue culture (TC / micropropagation) produce genetic copies of one chosen individual. They differ in how they copy and in what problems they solve. A cutting is a branch that grows its own roots — fast, cheap, no lab, but it inherits every pathogen the mother carries and the mother slowly ages. TC grows new plantlets from small pieces of tissue on sterile nutrient agar under a controlled sterile environment — expensive and skill-intensive, but it multiplies faster per unit floor space, banks genetics indefinitely without aging, and (via meristem culture) is the only route to strip a viroid like HpLVd out of an elite line. Most rooms run cuttings for daily production and reach for TC for the jobs cuttings cannot do.
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