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ABSTRACT. Recently, tissue culture micropropagation has become one of the most important ways to reproduce crops that are difficult to propagate by conventional methods, such as by seed or cuttings. The speed of tissue culture technology development has been accelerated by its practical commercialization. Tissue culture micropropagation offers many unique advantages over other propagation methods. At the present time, the greatest application of tissue culture micropropagation is to tropical ornamentals. However, systems for successfully producing food crops such as potato, asparagus, and strawberry have been defmed and are currently replacing traditional methods of vegetative propagation.For many crops, the tissue culture process is currently competitive as a method of propagation. However, the widespread application of tissue culture propagation to many other crops is limited, since it is currently not cost-competitive with conventional propagation methods, e.g., seeds, cuttings, division. The major factor limiting the costcompetitiveness of micropropagation for many crops is the quantity of labor and handling currently required. Tremendous development activities have been conducted in these cost reduction and market expansion areas and the major breakthrough will be made in the near future.

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