CLONING PLANTS BY TISSUE CULTURE
by Michael H. Renfroe
Part 2
The leaf is then cut into small pieces in a laminar flow hood that provides a clean working surface. The small pieces of plant tissue that are cut out of the leaf are called explants. Below you can see what they look like.
The explants are then placed on a chemical medium that provides nutrients for the plant tissues to grow and usually some plant hormones to encourage development of new organs from the plant tissue. Below is an explant that has been placed on a chemical medium inside a test tube.
If you look at an explant with a scanning electron microscope, it would look like this.
From this explant, new shoots would start to develop. Before they were obvious to you, as they just started to develop, they would look like this with the scanning electron microscope.
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