Seaweed Chutney

Now that I'm done tissue culture, I felt the need to do a little more reading to improve on my process. Remember a little while ago how I mentioned the need for plant growth hormones? Well I did a couple hours worth of reading on these substances, and it is really, really cool. Basically, these chemicals come in two forms, auxins and cytokinins. Both are responsible for cell enlargement and increased division, which makes for more plant in a short amount of time. Which is perfect for tissue culture.

I do not have a PhD in Chemistry and so was not able to decipher all of the jargon, but basically what I learned is that these chemicals are manufactured by the plant to help growth. They start at the roots and work there way up the stem to the apical growth (or middle stem). If this apical growth is removed or conditions are very nice, these plant hormones will trigger growth in the dormant nodes surrounding a plant (those funky little nubblets that surround a plant). This is why your prune plants- by severing the top you get those surrounding nodes to grow, making for a larger, bushier plant.

So where are these found? Well they are made by the plant. There are four auxins created by the plants themselves, though the most notable is called IAA (this is just an acronym, but because I don't want to type out the name and don't understand it at all, I'll leave it at that). However, this chemical is extremely unstable and frequently breaks down. In tissue culture, scientists have manufactured synthetic auxins and cytokinins that are cheap and way more powerful. Good for us!

However, I don't like to buy things from labs. It's too easy and still too expensive. So what if I make some chutney? As I was doing my reading, I came across "seaweed extract" as containing a potent mix of natural plant growth hormones. I tried to figure out why this is. It turns out that seaweed (or kelp) is one of the largest and fastest growing organisms on the planet. Some can grow two feet per day and top out at 260 feet long. Ya.

Now how does one "extract" these chemicals from seaweed. Well some further research showed that IAA is somewhat soluble in water, and one paper showed that these hormones can either be easily freed from the plant or are seriously locked inside proteins and won't leave. An extract is created when you mash the seaweed up and steep it in water and other solvents, and basically let it break down into a concentrated seaweed tea. Here's a video I found hysterical about a guy outlining his process, including the infamous "seaweed chutney."

So then I thought to myself, is there anything better than seaweed. Well as it turns out a lot of these extracts rich in plant growth hormones are also marketed as rejuvenating skin lotions. This is one of the primary selling points for coconut water, which I talked about earlier. But there is one plant on this earth that grows at an even more ungodly pace than seaweed.

Bamboo.

Bamboo is the rat of plants. With a growth rate of nearly three or four feet per day in some species, bamboo tops the charts of growth. So, what if I extracted the wicked cocktail of growth hormones in bamboo and applied it to samples in tissue culture. I couldn't find studies that had done this, though coconut water and seaweed had both been tried. I need to do a little more research into exactly what makes bamboo so hopped up on crazy dust and how one goes about extracting it. If this is possible, then here is a natural, flip floppin' unending source of growth hormone. Or I could always buy the laboratory stuff. WHOA. What if I could replace the growth hormone in bamboo with the ones we've made? Would it grow even faster? Or is bamboo nature's perfectly mutant result of 'roid rage?

I wanted to add one more note that just occurred to me. Seeds are very rich in growth hormones, which means that the seedlings do not produce very much, if at all. So whatever is substituted in the media (nutrient gel) of tissue culture is its main source of "inspiration" for growing.

I wanted to add another note. In an experiment based on the above logic, I could compare the effects of bamboo extract hormones vs. synthetic hormones on bamboo seeds. If the extract came from the same species, it would be a proper comparison.