From a Tiny Tissue to Thousands of Seedlings: Tissue Culture in Bangladesh

Thousands of disease-free seedlings can now be grown from a single tiny piece of plant tissue. Using modern tissue culture technology, researchers at Bangladesh's Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) are producing improved flower, fruit and horticultural seedlings at home rather than importing them. A report published in July 2026 described how the technique is cutting dependence on imports and putting quality, low-cost planting material within reach of farmers and a new generation of agri-entrepreneurs.

According to DAE's horticulture wing, the three tissue culture labs in operation produced 212,387 disease-free seedlings over the past year, of which 192,637 were sold to farmers and entrepreneurs. Officials involved with the programme said that once the labs still under construction come into full operation, the country's capacity to produce clean, high-quality planting material will multiply.

DAE runs three modern tissue culture laboratories at its horticulture centres in Madaripur, Bogura and Mymensingh. They were built under the Tissue Culture Laboratory cum Horticulture Centre Establishment and Development Project.

Five more modern labs are under construction, at Balaghata in Bandarban, Rajalakh in Savar, Cumilla Sadar, Char Fasson in Bhola and Dhanbari in Tangail. When these open, officials said, the supply of disease-free, quality seedlings will rise several times over and reach growers in more regions of the country.

Because the seedlings are produced in government labs, they reach farmers at less than half the price charged for comparable plants in neighbouring India or Pakistan. Improved varieties of gerbera, lilium and Cavendish banana and strawberry that once had to be bought abroad are now raised at home, and officials said thousands of farmers and new entrepreneurs are already benefiting from the clean stock.

Figures from DAE's horticulture wing show that of the 212,387 seedlings produced in the past year, Madaripur accounted for 90,237, Bogura for 62,500 and Mymensingh for 59,650. Demand was highest for G-9 banana, gerbera, strawberry and potato seedlings, and production targets for the three labs were raised for the coming financial year.

Prices tell much of the story. An imported gerbera seedling from India costs between Tk 80 and Tk 100, while a seedling of the same quality from a government lab costs about Tk 30. For high-value planting material the saving is large, and closing that gap is exactly what the labs are trying to do.

Once the remaining labs are running, annual output is expected to pass 500,000 seedlings. At Madaripur, lilium was produced by tissue culture for the first time, about 8,000 plants in the year, with a target of 20,000 for the coming season. The lab was also producing stevia, the natural sweetener plant, on a trial basis, with a plan to supply home-grown seedlings cheaply in place of imports that cost several hundred taka each.

Tissue culture, or micropropagation, is a set of techniques for growing plant cells, tissues or organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient medium of known composition. It is the standard way of producing large numbers of identical, or clonal, plants.

At the Madaripur lab every stage is carried out in a sterile, controlled environment. Technicians transfer tiny pieces of plant tissue in front of a laminar airflow cabinet, which bathes the work area in filtered air to keep out airborne contamination. Md. Enamul Haque, the agriculturist in charge of the lab, said that shoot tips taken from a selected mother plant are first sterilised and then placed on a special nutrient medium, where plant hormones trigger cell division. After several rounds of sub-culture, a single tiny piece of tissue can give rise to thousands of plantlets.

The science behind each step is well established. Explants are surface-sterilised, usually in alcohol and a hypochlorite solution, before being placed on media that contain mineral salts, vitamins and plant hormones, set with agar to make a solid jelly. The balance of hormones guides the plant: an excess of auxin tends to promote roots, an excess of cytokinin tends to promote shoots, and a balance of the two often produces a mass of unspecialised cells called callus. Shoot-tip or meristem culture is the preferred route for micropropagation because it carries the least risk of unwanted, so-called somaclonal, variation and can yield clean plants even from virus-infected stock.

Shoot and nodal propagation is usually described in four stages. In the first, establishment, a clean explant is brought into culture; in the second, multiplication, it is sub-cultured again and again to build up a stock of shoots; in the third, rooting, the shoots are induced to form roots; and in the fourth, acclimatisation or hardening, the young plants are weaned from the jar to ordinary growing conditions. Plants can be regenerated along three broad routes: from existing meristems, as in shoot-tip culture; by organogenesis, in which new shoots or roots form from a piece of tissue; and by non-zygotic, or somatic, embryogenesis, in which whole embryos form directly from ordinary body cells. Somatic embryogenesis can give much higher multiplication rates and can be run in liquid systems such as bioreactors, and it is the basis of the idea of 'artificial seeds'.

The plantlets are not sent straight to the field. They are first moved to a poly house and a hardening zone, where they are gradually acclimatised to outside conditions after the warm, humid, sheltered life of the culture jar. Only when they are strong enough are they handed to farmers. Each plant, Enamul Haque said, carries the traits of its mother plant and, being disease-free, grows quickly and usually gives a good yield in the field.

The appeal of tissue culture lies in two things: the plants are genetically identical to the mother plant, and they can be made free of the viruses and other pathogens that reduce yields. Because the plantlets are clones, a desirable mother plant passes its good traits to every one of them, so an orchard or flower bed raised from tissue-cultured stock is far more uniform than one grown from seed or from ordinary cuttings.

Agricultural scientist Prof. Dr. M. A. Rahim said the usefulness of tissue culture for producing virus-free, quality planting material is established internationally, and that for crops which need to be multiplied quickly and on a large scale there are few alternatives to it.

The advantages are why the method has spread so widely. It yields exact copies of a chosen plant, produces mature plants faster, and raises very large numbers in a small, controlled space. It can multiply plants that set few or no seeds, or that would otherwise need a particular pollinator, and because the cultures are sterile the planting material can be moved and stored with little risk of carrying pests. Tissue culture is also the standard way to germinate seeds that are otherwise very hard to raise, such as those of many orchids, and to keep stocks of genetic material in store.

The method has limits that researchers acknowledge. Because every plant is a clone, they all share the same strengths and the same weaknesses, so a disease that can attack one can attack the whole planting. Root explants are hard to isolate and often carry soil microbes that overrun the medium; some tissues grow slowly or die back; and the success of regeneration varies from one species, and even one variety, to another. Setting up and running the labs also needs trained staff, a steady power supply and strict hygiene. Even so, for high-value horticultural crops the gains in uniformity and plant health are large.

The labs raise planting material for a range of flowers, fruits and other horticultural crops. Several of them were chosen because they are high in value and were previously imported.

Gerbera is one of the world's most popular cut flowers. A member of the daisy family (Asteraceae) and sometimes called the African daisy, it is named after the German botanist Traugott Gerber. The genus has about 22 species, is native to tropical Africa and has since been introduced to Latin America and Southeast Asia; most commercial types are hybrids of Gerbera jamesonii and Gerbera viridifolia, grown both as garden plants and as cut flowers. Gerbera ranks as the fifth most used cut flower in the world, after roses, carnations, chrysanthemums and tulips, which is why a cheaper, disease-free local supply matters to the country's florists and growers.

Lilium, the true lily, is a genus of herbaceous plants that grow from underground bulbs and carry large, showy flowers. Of its roughly 119 species, most are native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere. Lilies are perennials, usually 30 to 180 cm tall, whose bulbs lack the papery outer coat of an onion and are normally planted in the dormant season at a depth of about two and a half times the bulb's height. Several, especially Lilium longiflorum, are important cut-flower crops, and growers often force them to flower out of season for particular markets, such as the Easter trade; breeders have also produced many ornamental hybrids for borders and containers. Lilies do best in well-drained, loamy soil with a pH of around 6.5.

The G-9 banana belongs to the Cavendish group, the bananas that dominate world trade. The group is named after William Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire; around 1834 a shipment from Mauritius reached him and his head gardener, Joseph Paxton, cultivated the plants at Chatsworth House, and bananas from the Canary Islands, now known to be Dwarf Cavendish, were imported into England by 1888. Cavendish bananas have been the most internationally traded type since the 1950s, when they replaced the Gros Michel variety after Panama disease devastated it. Grand Nain, the clone sold as the 'Chiquita banana', is the most important in international trade; Cavendish bananas made up about 47 percent of world banana production around the turn of the century and account for roughly 99 percent of the bananas exported to developed countries. Because Cavendish bananas are seedless, they can only be reproduced by cloning, which makes tissue culture a natural fit, though their narrow genetic base also leaves them exposed to diseases such as Fusarium wilt, known as Panama disease.

The garden strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) is a hybrid of two American species, the Virginia strawberry of eastern North America and the Chilean strawberry, which Amédée-François Frézier carried to Europe in 1714; French breeders in Brittany produced the hybrid in the 1750s, and its hybrid origin was confirmed in 1766. Garden strawberries are octoploid, and cultivars are grouped as short-day, long-day or day-neutral according to how day length controls their flowering. They are usually propagated by runners and grown commercially on raised beds covered with plastic, a system known as plasticulture, but the plants are prone to many diseases, including powdery mildew and gray mold, so clean, tissue-cultured planting stock is valuable for growers.

Seed potato is another candidate for the technique. Meristem-tip culture can produce clean plants even from virus-infected potato stock, which is why tissue culture is widely used around the world to raise virus-free seed potato. Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana), a plant native to Paraguay and Brazil whose leaves are 50 to 300 times sweeter than sugar, was being produced on a trial basis. The Guaraní people of South America, who called it ka'a he'ê, or 'sweet herb', have used its leaves for centuries to sweeten drinks; its sweetness comes from steviol glycosides such as stevioside and rebaudioside A, of which about 60 have been identified, and because the human body cannot break them down they add no calories. Commercial sweetener is made by extracting the leaves in hot water and then crystallising the glycosides, though at high concentration some extracts leave a faint licorice-like aftertaste. MD-2 pineapple, a prized dessert variety, was among the high-value plants that previously had to be imported.

The project is about more than producing seedlings. It supports university research, the training of agri-entrepreneurs, the development of new technology and the spread of that technology to the field. Thousands of entrepreneurs have already been trained, and many of them now grow flowers, fruit and high-value horticultural crops commercially using tissue-cultured seedlings.

DAE's director general, Md. Abdur Rahim, said that ensuring quality, disease-free seedlings is now a necessity for modern agriculture, because farmers who start with healthy, uniform plants get better productivity and better crop quality. He said the three labs are already producing successfully and that the new labs will improve the availability of quality seedlings across the country.

The project director, Talha Zubair Masrur, said the main aim is to make good, disease-free seedlings easily available and to carry laboratory technology quickly to the field. High-value planting material such as G-9 banana, MD-2 pineapple, gerbera and lilium once had to be imported, he said; now it is produced in government labs, which lowers farmers' production costs, strengthens the domestic nursery sector and creates new entrepreneurs. The project, he added, is building an effective link between university researchers, field-level agriculture officers and farmers, so that technology developed in the laboratory reaches the field quickly and new varieties and improved production methods spread more easily.

Tissue culture is not new, and Bangladesh is following a path taken by many countries. Prof. M. A. Rahim noted that the technology is used successfully in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Netherlands, among others. He said that when the labs under construction reach full capacity they will not only meet domestic demand but also help develop an export-oriented horticulture sector. The Netherlands, which he named among them, is the world's leading exporter of cut flowers and ornamental plants, and commercial growers there and in the other countries rely heavily on tissue-cultured planting material to supply uniform, disease-free stock at scale. For Bangladesh, taking the same route means its horticulture centres can raise at home the clean planting material that commercial flower and fruit growers once had to buy abroad, and can begin to aim at the regional and export markets those countries already serve.

The Department of Agricultural Extension is the main agricultural extension agency under Bangladesh's Ministry of Agriculture, responsible for passing improved technology and advice to farmers across the country. Its horticulture centres, spread over many districts, raise and distribute quality planting material for fruit, flower and other horticultural crops. The tissue culture labs sit within this network, giving the centres a modern tool for producing clean stock in large numbers and placing it, through the department's field officers, in the hands of growers.

Photo: Angphotorion / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24; Wikipedia (plant tissue culture, Cavendish banana, gerbera, Lilium, stevia, garden strawberry).