@plantsinjars_tc #tissueculture ♬ original sound – Laur
If you lovingly tend to your own indoor jungle, you might have found yourself obsessively searching for rare plants to add to your collection. Some plant collectors pay hundreds—or even thousands—of dollars for special flora that can’t be found in your standard garden store. However, one YouTuber name Laur (of Plants in Jars) admits that she may have “accidentally crashed the rare plant market” by using a process called “tissue culture” (sometimes referred to as TC) to easily clone hard-to-find plant species.
Tissue culture involves taking a small piece of tissue from an existing plant, sterilizing it, and placing it in a nutrient-rich gel where it can grow rapidly. This precise method produces plants that are genetically identical to the original specimen and can generate hundreds of clones in a short time. This means that anyone with a home lab kit can replicate rare and pricey plants. Laur even sells tissue culture starter kits on her website with step-by-step instructions on how to use them.
In a recent YouTube video, Laur explains how she bought a Begonia plant for $125 and then cloned it over 50 times from a leaf sample. “That’s over $6,000 worth of plants, all in exchange for about two hours of hands-on work.” She then goes on to explain exactly how she did it. “I think that the era of gatekeeping rare plants is over,” she said. “Even if you do tissue culture very badly, you can still end up with a lot of plants. It’s a very powerful propagation tool.”
While the tissue culture method is certainly exciting, some plant-lovers argue that by cloning plants, you’d be preventing the natural genetic variation seen in seed-grown plants. Others argue that cloning is actually less harmful to nature, since it replaces the need to harvest rare plants into extinction.
Laur likened the debate to the marketing of lab-grown versus mined diamonds, pointing out that demand for mined diamonds dropped as lab-grown alternatives gained popularity. In a similar way, lab-grown meat offers an alternative to raising and slaughtering animals.
Although tissue culture has existed for several decades, it has gained renewed popularity in recent years. Social media channels like Plants in Jars have helped demystify the process, showing just how accessible it can be for home growers. Laur says, “Tissue culture is what collapses artificial scarcity the fastest, not just because it’s a very effective method for cloning lots and lots of plants and more people are doing it, but also because more people know about it and understand it in the first place.”
Plenty of people online are in agreement with Laur’s perspective. One person wrote, “As an ecologist and conservationist not only is TC able to lower prices of rare plants, it ALSO saturates the market for poached wild plants as well!! TC is an act of conservation.”
Learn more about tissue culture by watching the video below.
One YouTuber name Laur (of Plants in Jars) admits that she may have “accidentally crashed the rare plant market” by using a process called “tissue culture” to easily clone hard-to-find plant species.
Plants in Jars: Website | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube
Source: I accidentally crashed the rare plant market
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