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Old 10-18-2008, 01:34 AM   #12 (permalink)
Gabe15
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Default Re: 3,300 banana plants

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Originally Posted by Chironex View Post
Gabe, just wondering how many you, individually, make each day at your lab? I would imagine it can become monotonous, but certainly hones your skills at carving out the meristems.
What we are doing right now we call "sorting", where we do not divide any meristems, we simply sort previously subcultured explants by size and cut them away from each other (if needed). Buds which are leafy with pseudostems are transferred to a medium with no cytokinins so they can resume normal growth for about a month until they are ready to ship. Buds with no leaves or pseudostem are transferred to a medium with a small amount of cytokinin to encourage them to leaf out. I personally do not do any of the initiation for our lab (putting plants into culture from a sucker), this was done a long time ago and I just work on multiplying the plants. During this stage, I probably make somewhere around 200 plants a day, working 2-3 hours.

What we do when building up our stock of explants is called multiplication. During that phase, we divide the buds (usually into 4 sections) and put them in a medium with a high cytokinin level. This encourages rapid multiplication of new buds (each of those divided pieces regenerates and forms more buds), thus one bud may quickly become about 16 (1x4x4). During that phase, you could do a lot more per day since it was easier and quicker. I think I would make about 500 per 2-3 hour shift.

It is very monotonous work, but its great practice and experience for higher level TC work in the future. Plus, I have full access to a banana TC lab for my own experiments!
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Growing bananas in Colorado, Washington, Hawaii since 2004. Commercial banana farmer, 200+ varieties.
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