Seeking Tissue Culture for Ghost Orchid
 

I have currently a blooming Ghost Orchid (Dendrophylax Lindenii). I will be saving the pollen from the flower this week (July 2013).

I am seeking assistance and a co-op from an experienced grower with facilities to culture tissue samples, autoclaves, etc. to reproduce from tissue samples more of the Ghost Orchid I have, as well to experiment with some of the pollen I have to attempt a cross-pollination with The Eurasian Ghost Orchid and other species.

If there is interest or if I can be pointed towards those facilities with good reputations and the desire to experiment, please contact me directly on aaron.e.saxton@gmail.com or call on 3049511952.

call Shane at OrchidOrigins, he can help.

I wonder if Aaron at OSP would be interested?
OSP

Thank you for the tip - I looked at orchidorigins website - and it appears to be excellent, I left a message for Shane to give me a call, hopefully, he can provide it.

Fingers crossed.

My understanding is that for tissue culture to work successfully, you need to have a piece of plant (not root) meristem tissue. With sympodials, these are a bit easier to procure, as this would be from an eye just beginning to grow. With monopodials, like ghost orchids, this would require destroying the growing tip, causing the demise of that entire growth. Since ghost orchids seldom produce multiple growing centers, this would mean the demise of the entire plant.

Just a thought...

---Prem

Prem's post reminded me that I've had a long-standing question about this (whether root apical meristem can be used instead of shoot apical meristem). I've done some Googling on the topic several times over the last few years and results were inconclusive.

Most sites seem to imply rather than state that SAM is usually used, but one site was more direct: "SAM is usually used but RAM can also be used".

Does anyone here have direct experience of tissue culturing using RAM, especially of monopodials?

Steve

Reply
 

Dear Samarak,

In theory, root tips have active meristems (RAM) are growing points that can be regenerated into callus tissues/PLBs or shoots. Some orchids have been successfully propagated with this method are: Oncidium, Vanda, Doritaenopsis, Cattleya, Clowesia, and Cymbidium.

However, root meristem is highly differentiated and more difficult to dedifferentiation (I mean to do tissue culture). They are not popularly used as orchid micropropagation material.

HN

What he said.

With many plants there are vegetative buds on the flower stalk that can be used as source tissue for tissue culture without destroying the mother plant. E.g. daylily, venus flytrap. From the Youtube video that I saw, it looks like there may be vegetative buds on the flower stalk of ghost orchid.