Tissue culture is to separate a certain part of organs or tissues in plants, such as stem tip, bud tip, cambium, root tip, germ and pith tissue, from plants under aseptic conditions, put them on suitable culture medium, and grow into complete plants after a period of growth and differentiation. Tissue culture is an effective method to accelerate plant propagation and create excellent varieties. It can provide many excellent new varieties for agricultural production and broad prospects for agricultural production factories.

The success of tissue culture mainly lies in the regeneration ability of plants and the totipotency of plant cells. The regeneration ability of higher plants is universal, such as the survival of willow cuttings and the growth of new rice after harvest. As long as there is sufficient nutrition, suitable temperature and humidity, light and no contamination by miscellaneous bacteria, in vitro tissues can grow into complete seedlings. A single cell from a plant. All cells of a plant contain a complete set of genetic information of the mother, and each cell has the characteristics of developing into a complete plant. This characteristic of plant cells is called cell totipotency. All living cells in plant objects have this ability.

Tissue culture requires extremely strict medium. This culture medium contains sugar, amino acids and various minerals, as well as appropriate amounts of various plant hormones in different proportions. Different plant organs and tissues, even the same organ at different development stages and different ages need different media.

Plants cultivated by tissue culture must go through the test-tube culture stage in the first stage, so plants cultivated by this method are also called "test-tube plants".