The tissue culture technique to generate banana saplings is seen as the solution in helping farmers to grow bananas on commercial scale.

Hitherto, the lack of banana saplings in large numbers especially the ones that produce high yield and highly resistant to diseases prevented farmers from taking up large scale farming.

However, in helping out the farmers Melaka Biotechnology Corporation, through its subsidiary Invitrotech Sdn Bhd has adopted the tissue culture method with encouraging results.

The company, established in 2005 started commercialising its saplings produced through tissue culture in 2007. The tissue culture is carried out at its lab in MIEL Industrial Area, Masjid Tanah, and so far has produced more than 300,000 banana saplings.

The banana varities produced using this method are the Berangan, Tanduk, Cavendish, Rastali and Nipah.

THE ADVANTAGES OF TISSUE CULTURE

The company's managing director Sukri Ibrahim told Bernama that apart from banana saplings the company also produced other commercial plants of high demand, for example herbs.

He listed the many advantages of using the tissue culture method to propogate plants.

- It can produce plants in big quantities that are healthy, free from diseases and uniform in their shape and output.
- The herbs bred in-vitro have little variation in their "secondary metabolites" content compared when it reproduces naturally.
- Suitable for plants that doesn't easily propagate and those in the verge of extinction.
- The plant tissue used (explant) is free from pathogen and is stored in-vitro, enabling safe exchange of plant genetic material between nations.

Source: www.bernama.com