Hi,

Use of antibiotics in plant tissue culture has both merits and demerits, so you have to be very careful about choosing the antibiotic and the optimum dosage concentration. Other than their specific antimicrobial effect many antibiotics exhibit phyto-toxicity. Generally, antibiotics like streptomycin or penicillin possess low levels of phyto-toxicity and broader anti-microbial effects than rifampicin or kanamycin. Therefore, you can try using streptomycin or penicillin in proper dosage after testing their level of toxicity on your explants. However, it is best if you can increase the sterilization of your system rather than using antibiotics, since, it may also induce some unseen changes in your explants and reduce the quality of the products targeted.

Dear Kaythi

Trimmed off the leaves of the explants and pretreat with streptomycin + tetracycline 0.1% for 90 min.