The new challenges which are faced today by the tissue
culture industry include cost efficiency, automation, control
and optimization of the in vitro microenvironment, and so
forth [29]. It is, therefore, important to bring about further
improvements in the existing tissue culture protocols [30].
Hence, alternatives to expensive inputs and infrastructure
have been sought and developed to reduce the costs of
plant micropropagation. The composition of culture media
used for shoot proliferation and rooting has a tremendous
influence on production costs. The replacement of plant
growth regulators used and decrease in general stages of
micropropagation can reduce costs of production. In this
study we tried using these combined techniques with the
aim of establishing an efficient, cost saving micropropagation
protocol for tea clone Iran 100. The results showed that a
combination of BAP and GA3 unlike the use of TDZ was
found to be the best for both multiple shoot formation
and shoot elongation. The most intriguing outcome of the
present investigation was that the aforementioned combi-
nation could have two products simultaneously. The first
product is the appropriate shoots for shoot multiplication
by applying BAP and the second one is multiplication of 2
to 3 cm shoots due to the use of GA3, which is proper for
rooting.