Plant-tissue culture basically involves growth of an excised plant organ or tissue called explant on a suitable nutrient medium under aseptic culturing conditions. Clean work areas with sufficient space for housing basic equipment like growth chambers, inoculation cabinets, shakers, centrifuges, autoclaves, ovens, microscopes, weighing equipment and so on in designated washing, media preparation, aseptic transfer and culture incubation areas are the infrastructural requirements.

Intact plants are photosynthetically active and fix atmospheric carbon dioxide with the help of water and sunlight thus producing carbon as source of basic energy. Required mineral nutrients are derived from the soil through the roots and plants synthesize a vast array of vitamins and other necessary biomolecules needed to support their structural and functional development. Plant cells growing in culture are not autotrophic with respect to carbon and it is essential to include a carbohydrate to provide the needed elements C, H, and O in the medium. Other nutritional requirements of cells in culture are similar to that of whole plants.

Media requirement for culturing plant cells in vitro depends on the plant species, plant organ, type of culture, and its purpose. There is no single universal medium catering to all types of cultures and different early workers have used their own media according to their work. These media were composed of simple salts, a sugar with different qualitative and quantitative combinations of various nutritive mixtures or extracts. Several ready-to-use media are now available such as Murashige and Skoog media and these are in general suitable for most plant-tissue-culture experiments. These are admixtures of chemically defined substances and are known as “synthetic media.” Alternatively media needed for a specific work may be constituted based on a published recipe with added chemical ingredients and may also be supplemented with natural mixtures such as casein hydrolysate, coconut milk, malt extract, yeast extract, tomato aqueous extract, water melon juice, and so on. Thus, media composition is variable according to the type of culture work. For example, alkaloid production in cultures sometimes requires media different from that needed to support the growth of cells. In many cases, elicitors or precursors are required to be added to improve metabolite production.

When we study the composition of media that supported successful plant cell culture trials, it is essentially composed of the following: