1992 Volume 48 Issue 1 Pages 29-37
The authors developed an aseptic plant tissue culture vessel system which enabled ventilation, air composition control, and the addition of nutrient solutions (see Fig. 1). One feature of the system is that two kinds of germ filters are attached directly to the culture vessel (see Fig. 1, Fig. 2, and Fig. 3). One filter is for forced ventilation and the other is for the addition of nutrient solutions.
The merits of the system we developed are as follows: (1) Number of air changes is maintained at a desired value without sterilization of the ventilated air and without risk of contamination. It is therefor possible to increase the number of air changes much more than in present aseptic culture vessels wherein ventilation is induced by diffusion. (2) Accordingly, air composition control is very easily achieved. For example, air humidity in vessels is easily kept at the desired value by regulating the water temperature in the bottle of humidity regulator, as shown in Fig. 1. Furthermore, CO2 enrichment is easily practicable. (3) The addition of nutrient solutions during cultivation is achieved easily and quickly (about one minute for addition of 5cm3 solution into a vessel) without opening the vessel cap, and no sterilization of the solution is needed. (4) No advance autoclave procedure is needed except for the culture vessel unit (see Fig. 1). No contamination was observed for 10 weeks even if the cultivation was conducted in an un-clean room. (5) When open air (CO2 concentration: ca. 400ppm) was introduced into the developed vessels, the growth of edible lily plantlets was better than those of two controlled plots (Control-P and Control-T plots) (see Table 2). When the CO2 concentration in developed vessels was maintained at 5, 000ppm, the growth of plantlets was about 20 times greater than those of Control-P and Control-T plots (see Table 2).
