1. In Orchid Industry:
(a) Mutations can be induced in plants of greater commercial value.
(b) Possibility of inducing polyploidy has also been looked into in certain orchids.
(c) Protoplast culture may be helpful in producing new varieties of orchids where meristem or embryo culture is a failure.
2. In Forestry:
(a) In breeding followed by crossing of inbreed lines to produce genetically improved plants, it is generally con¬sidered impractical for tree genera because of the long period between generations. Tissue culture may produce homo¬zygous diploid plants by haploid cultures.
(b) Regeneration of new polyploid lines from polyploid cells in culture is an advance, provided suitable genetic balances are obtained.
(c) In cell cultures, there is a continuous renewed range of either spontaneously occurring or (mutagen) induced
genetic variation, some of which could be incorporated into new plants by regeneration from these cultures.
(d) Somatic hybridization greatly enhances the process of recombining genetic and cytoplasmic factors.
(e) To prevent diseases, tissue culture has already produced a number of medicinal and other complex secondary products. This development has not yet reached the commercial level.
In Coffee Industry:
Coffee geneticists are interested in the application of tissue culture technique for the generation and selection of genetic variation with the yield of altering genetic con¬stitution to get new cultivars. The culture of cereal plant cells, however, does not seem to have an immediate appli¬cation towards the increase of the world supply of carbo¬hydrate, although it holds great promise for producing new types of cereal plants by anther culture and protoplast fusion. New cereal plants which can fix up the nitrogen and cereal varieties with strong disease resistance may be obtained by genetic manipulation and in future may cau.se a revolution in world food supply.
