Technology becomes essential to evaluate available resources with respect to the utilitarian value, make them available on a sustainable basis for future generations and convert them into products of economic value.  Tissue culture is a sun-rise technology for the multiplication of superior plants on large scale on a perpetual basis, production of novel and improved plants and for biosynthesis of products of industrial and medicinal value from natural plant resources.  Tissue culture in simple terms refers to the cultivation of the cells and tissues free from the mother plant in appropriate nutrient substrates under sterile conditions.  The cells in culture divide, multiply and produce compounds specific to the plants and also differentiate.  Since these plants are identical to modern plants, tissue culture has been effectively used for commercial production and delivery of plants by private enterprises.  More than 50 biotech industries are producing roughly 110 million plants annually for the export market.  This is out of an estimated production of 850 million plants worldwide with an annual growth rate of 19%.  Net profits multinational companies aim to fetch via production of pharmaceuticals that could be extracted from plant resources is the order of US$76 billion.

Applications of plant tissue culture will be particularly rewarding in the areas of agriculture, floriculture agroforestry, plant medicine and gene transfer across species and families.  Tissue culture and DNA technology together make what we call plant biotechnology in modern times.

Exposure and training in the application of these technologies is very important to develop skilled human resources in such a way that people in developing countries will be able to make use of them for economic productivity and income generation.  In essence, these technologies are used for converting the raw materials that exist in natural plant resources into products keeping in mind the economic well being of the people at large.

For the first time in Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous) ventured to offer a one week training in the applications of plant tissue culture to college teachers from all over Tamil Nadu.  About thirty college teachers representing various colleges were the participants of this programme.  In the programme that lasted five days (Jan 20-24, 1997) almost all the tissue culture techniques were condensed and presented to the participants in an encapsulated form.  That means the Resources Persons had to work hard well in advance and come ready with reagents and experimental kits which facilitated the completion of the experiments in time.  Naturally, all the participants had a sense of participation and each of them had to try an experiment on his/her own.  Although the programme was tightly scheduled from 9am to 5.30pm, it really lasted up to 9pm on some days.

In the workshop, the lectures by eminent experts in the field were followed by practical demonstrations.  Such aspects as plant tissue preparation, media preparation, culture initiation, contamination and browning, plant multiplication, haploidy in plant breeding, vectors used for plant transformation, hardening and field establishment were taught.  Initially it started with simple techniques of micropropagation of ornamental plants, then on the second and third day the participants learnt techniques of cell, embryo, anther and protoplast isolation and culture and preparation of synthetic seeds.  The last two days were devoted to subcellular isolation of genomic and plasmid DNA, their cleavage using special restriction enzymes, separation of them by agarose gel and transfer of genes to plant cells like Vigna and Rice through an Agrobacterium (bacterium) mediated process.