AUTOMATED TISSUE CULTURE

Plant tissue culture or micropropagation is a method of propagating disease-free clonal plants.  Plant tissue culture is favoured over conventional means such as by cuttings or seeds as it offers various advantages.  Usually micropropagation can be achieved in three ways: (i) by direct organogenesis via shoot tip or axillary buds, (ii) by indirect organogenesis through callus, and (iii) by somatic embryogenesis, indirectly or directly.

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Commercial exploitation of tissue culture technology is limited to only a few species because of high cost of the traditional tissue culture production processes.  Here, labour and media constitute more than half of the cost of a tissue culture operation.

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Perpetuum developed a new revolutionary cloning process which substantially reduces costs and timelines by devising a photoautotrophic system, which is a method of micropropagation without sugar in the culture medium, in which the growth or accumulation of carbohydrates of cultures is dependent fully upon photosynthesis and inorganic nutrient uptake.  The process utilizes state-of-the-art disposable bag bioreactors to produce somatic embryos en masse.  With improvement in media and other manipulative techniques, like Babyboom Transcription Factor, we can induce somatic embryogenesis at tremendous rates, resulting in higher yields, and faster timelines. 

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A key aspect of our cloning platform, is that it is fully automated by using robotic systems for dividing, separating, moving of planting tissues, shoots, somatic embryos and/or plantlets.  This way, little to no human intervention is needed, drastically reducing our overall production cost by as much as 70 percent.

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