I’m back at trying to propagate a lingonberry plant from a cell culture gathered from the wild! This time, I seem to be having a lot more success in terms of growing something that at least resembles a callus culture. Encouragingly, I have had similar growths from various parts of plants that I plated. I tried to excise buds from the meristem, without magnification, so its hard to say exactly what tissue the cells came from, because they were very small (generally, they are from in the buds).

In the future it might be worth looking at callus induction from leaves, a technique I did not know about.

These cultures are growing relatively slowly (months between re-plating), possibly due to the totally uncontrolled and unoptimized conditions they are in, aka an funky basement. Surprisingly, contamination has not been a huge issue (transfers have been done in a pcr hood).

The next step will be to take some larger cell masses and try to get them to grow a bud, shoot, root or leaf- to start turning back into a plant. My plan is to grow them on a deeper media in a different container, undera lighting, without 2ip on something like WPM with zeatin (although zeatin is expensive, so maybe just WPM!).