Using meristem culture as a method to rid plant material of virus and other pathogens is an accepted practice in many crops. Our laboratory has a license to produce NovaCane ® seedlings for the KZN midlands region. The lab has the capacity to culture plantlets from meristem tissue, grow and multiply them in sterile conditions with controlled temperature and lighting, before hardening them off in our glasshouses. Our aim is to become a trusted supplier of disease-free seedlings of the newer SASRI developed sugarcane varieties. Our core business is tissue culture, so in time we will partner with an established nursery to harden-off seedlings before field planting. In sugarcane, the most common tissue borne diseases are Ratoon Stunt Disease and Sugarcane Mosaic Virus. We confirm the absence of these pathogens before releasing the seedlings to certified nurseries.

Having honed our tissue culture skills on sugarcane, we are in a strong position to leverage this capability to tissue culture projects in other crops. We are currently working on protocols to do meristem culture in Phaseolus beans and would gladly consider projects in other crops. Feel free to contact us if you have an in vitro plant tissue culture project that you would like us to work on. It need not be related to disease control, we would also consider plant breeding related projects such as embryo rescue, doubled haploid production and rapid generation cycling.

We have some experience in generating Stenocarpella maydis inoculum for managed plant breeding trials. Our lab has produced large quantities of dry inoculum used to induce diplodia field epidemics in maize breeding trials. For this, the customer provided their own production protocol. We have also developed our in-house protocol for generating liquid-based S. maydis spore concentrations. We have surplus capacity in our disease inoculum production section and would gladly consider projects to produce disease inoculum by either following or developing a protocol.

One of our other areas of expertise is inoculated pot trials. We have accumulated a collection of disease isolates of many common soil pathogens (Fusarium, Macrophomina, Exserohilum, Pythium, Rhizoctonia, Sclerotium and Sclerotinia), so our lab is very well placed to execute projects that may involve microbial or chemical seed treatments in pot experiments.