ScienceTeach Video: How to Do Banana Tissue Culture?

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Tissue culture is one of the asexual methods of massively propagating banana plants. Banana demonstrates the so called parthenocarpy, a condition wherein a fruit develops even without prior fertilization. They reproduce through suckers that grow around the mother plant.

A ground tissue is usually extracted from the source plant in an aseptic environment. They are then placed in a bottle with gelled phytohormones and incubated. Overtime, the cells will dedifferentiate, reinitiate cell division and could even regenerate the whole plant, hence, totipotency. In animal cells however, differentiation is irreversible.

But there's more to this video than itself. We always have our first time in everything. I made this video after my Biotechnology class and I received a quick training from the technician at the Banana Tissue Culture Laboratory of the University. But this was almost eight years past.  Back then, Movie Maker was the most friendly and handy editing software at hand. And as far as I am concerned, I used a digicam in documenting this activity.

I uploaded this in YouTube in 2011 and forgot about it. To my surprise, this has become my most viewed video as of yet with more than 276,000 views.

I also received a lot of comments, positive and negative. But a number of them were distracted by the background music I used. Others called me out on some of the protocols used that could contaminate the tissues. What do they expect of a first timer? Here's some of them:


I believe that my students' exposure in this activity, regardless of breaching some protocols, had in one way or two, helped them to engage with science positively.

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