The regeneration of severed pea apices

Abstract

Successful graft unions between meristematic tissues have been made in apices of the pea, Pisum sativurn L. A technique for preventing desiccation of apices during and after the operations was developed. Apical segments ranging from about 200µ down to 50µ. in depth were successfully grafted back to their parent plant. The subsequent development of grafted apices was completely normal. These experiments show that a complete shoot can be regenerated from an apical segment less than one-thousandth of a cubic millimetre in volume, containing about 600 cells. This is smaller than any graft previously recorded.