GENERATING TETRAPLOID MELONS FROM TISSUE CULTURE

Spontaneous Tetraploid Melons

Since 1968, three spontaneous 4x melons (Cucumis melo L.) plants were discovered in our field or greenhouse plantings. Two were found in the cultivar Planters Jumbo and one in the virescent marker C879-52. Each of these 4x plants had rounded cotyledons, shorter internodes, thicker stems and leaves, more hairs, and smaller fruits, with larger stem and blossom scars, than their 2x counterparts. A...

From error to tetraploid

From error to tetraploid naphase is not the point of no return, say Qinghua Shi and Randall King (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA). If cells make errors in anaphase chromosome segregation, they mount a rescue operation. The final stages of cytokinesis shut down, producing tetraploid cells that might even be able to regenerate functional diploid cells. Shi and King started out looking for dif...

Secondary Products from Plant Tissue Culture

Isolating phagosomes from tissue culture cells.

Phagocytosis is the process by which receptors at the plasma membrane are used to engulf a particle such as a bacterium, parasite, or dead cell. Phagosomes can be isolated from tissue culture cells by various centrifugation methods, including the use of differential density gradients or sucrose step gradients, but these methods are time-consuming or otherwise difficult. We describe here a proto...

Isolation of mitochondria from tissue culture cells.

The number of mitochondria per cell varies substantially from cell line to cell line. For example, human HeLa cells contain at least twice as many mitochondria as smaller mouse L cells. This protocol starts with a washed cell pellet of 1-2 mL derived from ∼10⁹ cells grown in culture. The cells are swollen in a hypotonic buffer and ruptured with a Dounce or Potter-Elvehjem homogenizer using a ti...