Wasabi Cloning
Answered by: Inge Poot
Question from: Darrin
Posted on: January 03, 2008

I am growing one wasabi plant and I have been doing my homework but I want to know how to clone it. (I have cloned plants in the past such as tomato plants). My question is if you know of any ways to clone a root vegetable. I know it has to grow little "nubs" first but that is all I know.

Making cuttings of plants is the most common way to clone plants. With wasabi, you cut the root into about 1 cm slices, let the ends callus over and then after a few days plant the slices into sterile tropical plant soil and keep barely moist, but not dry or sopping wet. Those pieces that had eyes on them should sprout and produce new plants.

To produce huge quantities of plants you would have to use a liquid nutrient medium to grow bits of the plant root while agitating the medium at all times to prevent differentiation into root and shoot -which happens in response to the action of gravity on the undifferentiated cell clumps. The starting piece of root and all materials have to be sterile and unfortunately every type of plant requires a different nutrient medium to stimulate the cancer-like proliferation and growth. The proliferations are cut apart and either put back into the liquid medium on the shaker bench or table or they are put onto a solid medium to allow differentiation into root and shoot. The little plantlets are then moved into soil when large enough. I do not know what type of medium wasabi requires.

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