Different types of Plant Tissue Culture mediums. But does it matter?

Plant Tissue Culture (PTC) uses specific-for-plant growth agar as an artificial medium. Commonly you will hear the name "MS Medium", or its full name Murashige and Skoog Media, as the composition for PTC. However, there are actually many more different mediums that are made available for PTC based on factors such as the type of plants being cloned. In this short article, I will be talking about the different types of PTC mediums, focusing on the common ones, and if using a different medium matters when you do PTC.

Species-Specific Mediums

First of all, lets talk about why are there different mediums. The key word here is optimization. Different species of plants may have different nutrient requirements to grow in vitro. For example, ferns are cloned in Murashige Fern Multiplication Medium. It is a specific medium tested and studied to grow ferns more effectively. But does this mean we should not grow the fern in the typical MS Media? No, you can clone ferns in the MS Media as well. Just maybe the growth of the fern will be even more suited to the Murashige Fern Multiplication Medium because the medium was specifically tailored to grow ferns. Similar to this case, the same rules applies for other species-specific mediums such as Orchid Seed Sowing Mediums, Woody Plant Media, and so on. These mediums can be purchased from various scientific suppliers under various brands.

Photo from Phytotechlab.com

Image from Plantmedia.com

Gamborg B5 Medium

A great alternative to the MS Media, the Gamborg B5 Media is actually made quite similar. The only main differences between the B5 media and MS Media is that the B5 media contains less amounts of nitrate, potassium, and ammonia in its macronutrient component. This makes the B5 media to have lower amounts of inorganic nutrients as compared to the MS Media.

White's Medium

Developed by P. R. White 1963, this medium is one of the earliest medium fabricated for plant tissue culture. It was initially made for the micropropagation of root cultures for tomato plants. Is composition contains lower concentrations of salts, but with higher concentrations of Magnesium Sulphate (MgSO4). The medium is said to contain less nitrates by around 19% than of MS Media.

N6 Medium