We plan to improve our curriculum in biology by expanding and improving laboratory exercises in plant cell culture in our Botany and Introductory Biology courses, and by including them in a new course, Biotechnology in Theory and Practice.This year, we made a modest beginning in Botany by culturing African violet leaf tissue, growing callus tissue from hypocotyls of sterile Brassica rapa seedlings, and making vacuole preparations from flower petal cells. We are excited about the outcome of the B. rapa exercise, and are developing additional plant culture exercises from it. Students enjoyed working with B. rapa because the seedlings and callus tissue grew so fast. They also enjoyed isolating the large, colorful vacuoles from flower petals. The vacuoles gave them a new way to study the effects of hyper- and hypotonic solutions.Now we want to incorporate more sophisticated manipulations of plant cultures, such as shoot culture and morphogenesis, and for that we will need the controlled light and temperature conditions provided by growth chambers. We also need to maintain suspension cultures of plant cells for protoplast isolation, cloning of single cells, and nutrition. experiments, and for those we need gyrotary shaker.
