Cell Biology

Nunhems' Cell Biology team focuses on plant improvement through various technologies associated with plant tissue, cell and organ manipulation. Mid-last century, it was discovered that many plant cells have a characteristic referred to as totipotency, that enables them under the right conditions to regenerate from a single cell into a whole plant again. By identifying particular stages of plant development and targeted technologies, we are able to coax the plant into doing this very process for some of our important crops.

This helps us to save time in developing improved varieties: We can take a piece of tissue of a plant and create many identical copies of that donor plant. This has been done for centuries with certain crop plants. In our modern tissue culture laboratories, the process is conducted with very small pieces of tissue under aseptic conditions.

Another common application of this technology is culturing plant reproductive organs. The result is a plant with half the normal number of chromosomes. This haploid plant can be lead to double its chromosome complement. The final product of this work is a 'doubled- haploid', a truly homozygous individual. This technique is a time-saving alternative to repeated selfing for the creation of inbred lines.