Succulent Tissue Culture

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Introduction.

We welcome you to the website of Succulent Tissue Culture (S.T.C.).
Robert Wellens and Teresa Sierra started in 1995 STC which has grown to a medium-sized tissue culture laboratory mainly focussed on the in vitro multiplication of rare and endangered succulent plants.
Beside the production of rare succulents, STC produces over 200 species of garden ornamental plants and house pot plants for specific customers world wide and acts as a research-partner in developping new protocols enhancing ornamental plant breeding.
STC has a state-of-the-art cleanroom facility and produces a growing number of rare and  endangered plants, some even being extinct in their natural habitat.

Tissue culture techniques offer us a range of different approaches to establish a reliable in vitro protocol to multiply all sorts of succulent plants. An experienced team of scientists is daily working on improving standard protocols, inventing new ways of production technology and implementing these to the ever-growing number of rare plants.
A lot of time is devoted to new discoveries in the field of tissue culture, both in succulent plants and in ornamental garden or house plants.

Our techniques vary from single axilliairy plant reproduction to organogenesis and embryogenesis on calli from a specific range of (succulent) plants.
Mutation-induction, haploid- and tetraploid-induction and all sorts of specific techniques are used to enhance plant breeders with their specific crops. 

Our aim is to provide interested collectors and whole-salers with extremely rare plants on one hand and to protect against illegal collection and plant destruction in habitat on the other hand.
With the use of tissue culture there is  less need to collect habitat plants and in this way STC hopes to contribute to keep the world heritage of succulent plants existing.

STC is a member of the Ducth organization Plantum NL and acts upon sales conditions from this group for the exclusive research on Tissue Culture products (see: www.plantum.nl/pdf/weefselkweek_engels.pdf   sales conditions and www.plantum.nl/pdf/weefselkweek_engelsio.pdf  for work being caried out in tissue culture).

Staff.

Ing. Robert Wellens
Ing. Robert Wellens, director of STC, studied botany, plant breeding and tissue culture techniques at the Wageningen University, is together with Teresa Sierra -his partner-, the founder of STC. Robert has a degree in management techniques and biotechnology.

Teresa Sierra
Teresa Sierra, co-founder of STC and partner of Robert, runs the greenhouse of STC. Teresa studied languages in the past –and uses her knowledge and skills for answering Italian, Spanish or French requests-, she is now in charge of our 1200 m2 greenhouse facility and beside all our translation work she in charge of packing and posting of online orders.

Alphonsina Tettelaar
Alphonsina Tettelaar, mainly works the lab of STC, studied specialized courses on tissue culture and has over 15 years of experience in commercial and scientific tissue culture techniques, she now mainly runs the productions in the tissue culture lab.

Luc van Riet
Luc is still studying but works on a part-time base in our greenhouse and is helping us transplanting all the in vitro produced plants

Freek Bahlke
Freek, also a student, joined us in the greenhouse; transplanting mainly vitro plants and potting all the other plants.
Freek also occasionally helps us in the lab.

Francien Overbeeke
Francien joined us in the lab in 2008, she is being trained to become an experienced laboratory-assistant. She now mainly produces all Haworthias and learns different micropropagation techniques on all our different plant species.

 

Variegates

One of the top inventions of STC is the induction of variegation into (succulent) plants.
Robert Wellens started his first experiments in 2003 and finally achieved to end up with a successful protocol of producing all sorts of variegates, not only succulent plants.
This unique technique offers an enormously potential in further (succulent) plant breeding for the ornamental market. Most of the variegates that STC produces are sold in the plant auction.