Every now and then I read through published articles on the science of cactus, and then post my analysis of the quality of the science.
This is not one of those times.
Instead, I pass along this abstract from National Center for Biotechnology Information on Tissue Cultures of a Cactus.
Tissue Cultures of a Cactus.
Tissue cultures have been established from stems of Trichocereus spachianus (Riccob.) for the purpose of studying alkaloid biosynthesis in cactus tissue. On a basal inorganic medium supplemented with glucose, coconut milk, and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, three distinct types of callus are initiated. One is greenish, compact, and slow-growing; another is firm and yellowish, with a moderate growth rate; the third is very friable and rapid-growing. The growth habit remains constant for a given clone in successive subcultures.
PMID: 17749633 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Now, I don’t purport to understand this. In fact, I can state categorically that I have no idea what this is about. However, since I run the number 1 cactus blog on the world wide web I am contractually obligated to present information that even I don’t know a thing about, and never will. So here you go.
If anyone can abstract this abstract down to one clear sentence, I will pay you $5.99, or send along a very lovely Echinopsis.
You can also bookmark this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
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June 29th, 2008 at 6:17 am
Oooo! Oooo! I want to try!
We figured out how to tissue culture Trichocereus spachianus and found that the plants so created can take three different forms.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:56 am
This article is about deliberately creating cactus cancer cell lines (basically blobs of cactus cells that look noting like a plant) by treating normal cactus cells with plant hormones (coconut milk and the herbicide 2, 4-D a plant hormone mimic) in order to get a culture of one but un-natural type of cactus cell (as opposed to the many types of cells found in a normal cactus). The authors generated 3 distinct cactus cell blobs, but don’t mention if any of them synthesize alkaloids (a type of plant defensive chemical). If none of these cell lines produce alkaloids then they could not be used to study alkaloid creation.
Hope this helps!
June 30th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
It boggles the mind.