Un fragmento de brote, dividido una y otra vez.
What follows is the technique, described generically: how a fragment of tissue is made to produce shoots instead of stem, and what it costs at each of the four places it fails. It is not a record of anything this project has done. No explant has been placed and no culture exists.
Twenty-two stops on one path, from a single cut fragment to a tray of hardened plants. Click a stop; where a transition has a clip, it plays and lands on the next frame, and the labels appear once the picture is still.
Raw residue
A plant cell retains the genetic instructions for the whole plant. That single property — totipotency — is what the technique exploits; everything else is housekeeping around it.
A fragment of shoot is surface-disinfected and set on a defined nutrient medium: mineral salts, vitamins, a carbon source — sucrose — and growth regulators. Three media are used in sequence, and the regulators are what separate them. The first is for establishment; its high cytokinin-to-auxin ratio suppresses apical dominance and pushes the tissue toward producing more shoots rather than one taller one. Where a cutting gives one plant, an explant gives a cluster. The second raises the cytokinin further and is the multiplication medium; the third carries auxin and is for rooting.
That cluster is divided and re-cultured, and that is the cycle. Each pass multiplies the shoot count instead of adding to it, so the gain is a multiplication ratio — shoots out over shoots in — and the total grows exponentially as rounds accumulate, rather than by a fixed increment each time. Shoots are then moved to an auxin medium to root, and finally acclimatised: out of sterile, saturated, sugar-fed culture into real air, real light and real soil, while stomata and cuticle begin to function.
Four places it fails, and they are not incidental: contamination at initiation, phenolic browning of the explant, rooting, and survival through hardening. The losses concentrate at the end.
The commercial boundary runs along the invasive/endemic line. Invasive biomass may be valorized by a separate company. Endemic propagation is GHRI's alone and carries a binding commitment not to commercialise it: no propagation for commercial purposes, no transfer to third parties, and a waiver of patent and of all commercial exploitation rights. Material moves one way; what returns is the protocol — free, unconditional, unlimited in time, and published with negative results included.