Do you need tissue culture?
Sometimes, no. Tissue culture is a tool. The real question is whether it's the right tool for the job, and that depends entirely on what you're trying to do. Here's some scenarios.
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You buy clones to flower
If you're fine purchasing starts and you aren't particularly invested in any one strain, you don't need tissue culture. Put the money somewhere it does more for you.
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You want to preserve a few strains
That can be done with a minimal setup; you don't need an entire lab. You need a clean space with minimal equipment, a working protocol, and someone to get you started.
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You need clean mothers, continuously
If you want a steady supply of clean G0 mothers to pull G1 clones from, then yes. That's an ongoing operation, and it needs a small lab behind it.
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You have a lab already and it isn't producing
Equipment is in, somebody got trained once (or not), and cultures still aren't established. This is the most common situation I get called into, and it's almost never the equipment.
Where most people get it wrong
The kit companies want the sale. The nurseries want the contract. Nearly everyone advising you on tissue culture also sells you something downstream of the answer. I don't sell kits, labs, or testing, so I have no reason to talk you into more than you need. Plenty of the time the right call is a smaller setup than you were quoted, or none at all.
Most programs that fail don't fail on the science. They fail because the system wasn't built to sustain it. Contamination control breaks down, media isn't right for the cultivar, and scale-up introduces variables nobody accounted for at the bench.
If your lab isn't working...
A stalled lab is a diagnostic problem, not a shopping problem. Before anyone buys another piece of equipment, the actual failure point has to get identified. Usually it's one of these.
- Contamination tracing - Where it's entering, which is rarely where people assume. Bacterial, fungal, endophytic contamination each point somewhere different.
- Media Formulation - Whether your formulation actually matches your cultivar and the stage you're running. Generic media can slowly rob plant health.
- Sterilization regime - Explant source, disinfectant, concentration, and timing.
- Technique at the hood - The part that never shows up in a written protocol and accounts for its fair share of losses.
- Records & SOPs - So the fix survives the person who made it, and the next failure is traceable instead of mysterious.
If you're building
Once you know what you're building, I help you build it. Quoted per project, because scope depends entirely on scale.
- Lab design and setup - Physical layout, laminar flow placement, contamination control zones, equipment selection, and workflow.
- Media formulation and optimization - Nutrient media for establishment, multiplication, rooting, and acclimatization, with cultivar-specific adjustments where needed.
- Culture establishment and protocol development - Explant selection, surface sterilization, establishment procedures, and documented workflows your team can actually repeat.
- Genetic fidelity monitoring - Detecting somaclonal variation and holding true-to-type material through extended culture cycles, with genomic verification where it's warranted.
- Micropropagation scale-up - Moving from bench to production volume without losing contamination control or consistency.
- Staff training and SOPs - Written protocols and hands-on training built for real teams, not just scientists.
- Acclimatization and hardening - Getting plantlets from the lab to the grower with minimal losses.
Not sure where you land?
Tell me what you're working with and what you're trying to achieve. Sometimes the honest answer is that you don't need a lab, and I'll tell you that too.