Importance of Single Cell Culture

Importance of Single Cell Culture

1. Single cell culture could be used successfully to obtain single cell clones.

2. Plants could be regenerated from the callus tissues derived from single cell clones.

3. The occurrences of high degree of spontaneous variability in the cultured tissue and their exploitation through single cell culture are very important in relation to crop improvement programmes.

4. Isolated single cells can be handed as microbial system for the treatment of mutagens and for mutant selection. In practice, single cells are grown on medium containing the mutagenic compounds and the proliferation cell lines are isolated. The mutant nature of the selected cell lines can be confirmed by regenerating the plants and comparing their phenotypes with normal plant. Many cell lines resistant to amino acid analogues, antibiotics , herbicides , fungal toxins etc. have been selected by this simple method.

5. Several workers have reported the synthesis of several times higher amounts of alkaloids, stearoids by cell culture than the alkaloid content in the intact plant. Therefore, large scale production of such compounds from single cells is possible.

6. Biotransformation means the cellular conversion of an ecogenously supplied substrate compounds not available in the cell or the precursor of a particular cellular compound to a new compound or the known compounds in higher amount.

7. Induction of polyploidy has been found to be very useful for plant breeding to overcome the problem of sterility associated with hybrids of unrelated plants. Polyploidy can easily be achieved by single cell culture.