As Jamaica works to strengthen its food production systems and recover from the recent passage of Hurricane Melissa, advanced plant science is quietly playing a vital role—ensuring farmers have reliable access to clean, healthy, and abundant planting material.
One of the leading methods driving this effort is tissue culture technology, applied locally by the Scientific Research Council (SRC) to rapidly multiply crops and provide the agricultural sector with disease-free plants.
Team Leader for Biotechnology at the SRC, Dr. Collin Scantlebury, tells JIS News that tissue culture is a long-established scientific technique which enables entire plants to be grown from very small pieces of plant tissue.
“Tissue culture is a very old technique. It has been used since the early 20th century, where people found out that you can use a piece of a plant, maybe a leaf, a shoot tip, a node and from that, generate a whole entire plant,” he says.
Source: Jamaica Information Service