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Vile vial

Cindy

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Common among tissue cultured plants?  Can it be saved? Like cutting off the weird part...

P1010006.jpg


P1010012.jpg
 
Odd. It might just fix itself In time.
 
Is that a reflection of a limited gene pool? Do TC plants need occasional infusions of fresh DNA?
 
If that's the bizzare deformity that I think it is, it will not get any better. This seems to be a trend lately with store-boughten Nepenthes. One garden center near me has two very large N. ventratas afflicted with this. They're very hiddeous all deformed and scrunched up. Nobodys buying them of course because the way they look. I aparently don't know what I'm talking about when I tell the kids who work at the store that the plants are diseased or deformed and not looking the way they're supposed to...

I had received an "alata" (probably ventrata) off ebay which was afflicted with this so I threw it out because nobody has a concrete answer as to what exactly is causing Neps to show this and I wasn't about to risk my whole collection for one easily replaceable plant. If it is TC related I imagine it would be due to too much shoot promoting agent in their agar medium. These plants just make denser and denser small deformed foliage. It doesn't seem to apppear until the plant has been growing for a while, as all plants I've seen like this have great looks for a while and then it's like all of a sudden it starts making these mutant leaves.
 
I think it is TC because I can get growth like that on other plants that i have used growth regs on. It produces too much foliage without the energy to finish the growth of any individual leaf.

Joe
 
Could be a genetic problem, could be excess growth regulators.. hard to say for sure. Looks like there might be some normal looking older leaves and then this mess showed up.. perhaps when they were put on new medium in the vials. If that is the case it will grow out of it after a while once potted up.

Tony
 
Although NOT with the deformed growth.  I have seen that rough/cratered leaf texture in a N. alata that was also a TC plant (re: my "N alata 'Biflora'" post).  It took several months but the plant did finally produce healthy normal leaves.  I put it down to the result of inappropriate use of hormones (hence why it took a while to grow out of it).

My 'guess' is that yours is suffering the same/similar thing (just a worse case) so I'd not give up on it.  Maybe (just to be safe) keep it separate from the rest of your collection for now, but give it a few months to see if it wil grow out of it.

Here's my N. alata when I got it.  You'll see the similarity in the leaf texture:

NAlataBifloraSide.jpg


Taken from my other post, where it is actually concluded to be a N. ventricosa, here is what it now looks like 5 months on.  You can still see one of the older 'rough' leaves:

AlataBiflora.jpg


Aaron.
 
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