Editing Floriculture (section)

=== Plant tissue culture, micropropagation ===
Plant propagation has always been a part of flower and plant gardening. Plant [[tissue culture]] began as a way to save orchid embryos as orchid fanciers bred new cultivars. Most horticulture and many botany programs in the world had scientists working on plant propagation through tissue culture techniques from the 1950s to the 1980s.<ref>Thorpe, T. A. (2007). History of plant tissue culture. ''Molecular biotechnology'', ''37'', 169–180.</ref><ref>Gamborg, O. L., Murashige, T., Thorpe, T. A., & Vasil, I. K. (1976). Plant tissue culture media. ''In vitro'', ''12''(7), 473-478.</ref><ref>García-Gonzáles, R., Quiroz, K., Carrasco, B., & Caligari, P. (2010). Plant tissue culture: Current status, opportunities and challenges. ''International Journal of Agriculture and Natural Resources'', ''37''(3), 5-30.</ref> These programs expanded the knowledge base on a wide range of taxa and allowed industry to find the connection to commercial production. Plant tissue culture allowed new, unique phenotypes and genotypes to be propagated in large numbers quickly. Many cultivars of foliage plants are available only from tissue culture.<ref>Griffith, L. P. (1998). Tropical Foliage Plants: A Grower's Guide. United States: Ball Pub.</ref> Uniquely, tissue cultured [[Pelargonium|geraniums]] were heat treated to allow the identification and removal of many viruses, virus-indexed.<ref>Oglevee-O'Donovan, W. (1986). Production of culture virus-indexed geraniums. In ''Tissue culture as a plant production system for horticultural crops: Conference on Tissue Culture as a Plant Production System for Horticultural Crops, Beltsville, MD, October 20–23, 1985'' (pp. 119-123). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.</ref> As viruses were removed, many horticultural characteristics of the many cultivars disappeared; this led plant breeders to leave many viruses in breeding lines for future cultivars. Heat treatment of tissue culture of many taxa has since been used to remove bacteria and virus pathogens in various floriculture crops.