Isolation and Regeneration of Protoplasts from Higher Plants

The aseptic culture of plant cells has emerged in recent years as a powerful technique not only for the study of cell differentiation, but also for plant improvement and agriculture. During the past few years, the potential of plant cell culture has vastly improved due to the fast emerging technology of isolation, cultivation, and fusion, of protoplasts. The term “protoplast” in this respect refers to the spherical plasmolyzed contents of a plant cell enclosed in the plasmalemma and set free of the covering cell wall by a suitable experimental method. The naked cells so obtained constitute an ideal “free cell” developmental system because protoplasts are separate entities capable of reforming cell walls and regenerating whole plants. This fact is of considerable advantage as not only has clonal, large scale, propagation of desired plants become much more efficient, but being discrete, the protoplasts — especially from haploid plants or cell lines — can be handled like microbes and are well suited to mutagenic treatments and somatic cell genetics.