Plant breeding in vitro

Over the centuries a variety of techniques have been developed to propagate plants vegetatively — dividing, layering, and grafting. These traditional methods are all slow, however, and in recent years there has been much interest in ‘test-tube’ breeding of plants. This is not only very fast — a single rose can produce up to 400 000 descendants in a single year — but is also a very valuable means of eradicating plant diseases.