National Certification System for Tissue Culture Raised Plants
National Certification System for Tissue Culture Raised Plants
Government of India established the “National Certification System for Tissue Culture Raised Plants (NCS-TCP)” authorizing Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science & Technology as the Certification Agency for ensuring production and distribution of quality tissue culture planting materials.
The purpose of National Certification System for Tissue Culture Raised Plants (NCS-TCP) is to ensure production and distribution of quality tissue culture planting materials. NCS-TCP is a unique quality management system, first of its kind in the world which ensures recognition of Tissue Culture Production Facility for the production of quality planting material and certification of end products.
With increasing demand for agricultural, forestry, plantation and horticulture crops, the demand for high quality, high yielding, disease free planting stock has been increased significantly over the last two decades. Conventional propagation method which includes sowing of seeds, propagation by cutting, layering etc suffers from the inherent limitations in the number that can be produced, non-uniformity of quality and incidence of diseases. Plant Tissue Culture has emerged as an important biotechnology and commercially viable tool to multiply elite varieties of high quality, disease free and high yielding plants rapidly in the laboratory irrespective of the season of the year. In India the tissue culture Industry is growing at a rate of 15% per annum.
Plant tissue culture is a collection of techniques used to maintain or grow plant cells, tissues or organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture medium of known composition. Plant tissue culture is widely used to produce clones of a plant in a method known as micro-propagation. Different techniques in plant tissue culture may offer certain advantages over traditional methods of propagation, including:
The production of exact copies of plants that produce particularly good flowers, fruits, or have other desirable traits.
To quickly produce mature plants.
The production of multiples of plants in the absence of seeds or necessary pollinators to produce seeds.
The regeneration of whole plants from plant cells that have been genetically modified.
The production of plants in sterile containers that allows them to be moved with greatly reduced chances of transmitting diseases, pests, and pathogens.
The production of plants from seeds that otherwise have very low chances of germinating and growing, i.e.: orchids and Nepenthes.
To clear particular plants of viral and other infections and to quickly multiply these plants as 'cleaned stock' for horticulture and agriculture.
Plant tissue culture relies on the fact that many plant cells have the ability to regenerate a whole plant (totipotency). Single cells, plant cells without cell walls (protoplasts), pieces of leaves, stems or roots can often be used to generate a new plant on culture media given the required nutrients and plant hormones.
