Murashige & Skoog Basal Medium — 1L

Description

🧫 Murashige & Skoog (MS) Basal Medium — the single most cited plant tissue culture medium ever formulated, developed by Toshio Murashige & Folke Skoog in 1962 for tobacco callus and since adapted for thousands of species.

💡 Why MS became the universal default

MS is high in macronutrients — roughly 10× the nitrogen and potassium of earlier media — and includes a complete micronutrient package with iron as Fe-EDTA. That combination drives fast cell division and shoot proliferation across most dicot species without requiring supplementation.

🌱 Ideal for

• ✅ Micropropagation of most dicots and many monocots
• ✅ Callus induction (adjust hormones as needed)
• ✅ Shoot proliferation & elongation
• ✅ Baseline medium when no species-specific protocol exists
• ⚠️ Too high-salt for woody plants → use WPM or DKW instead

🧪 Preparation

Dissolve 4.43 g in ~800 mL distilled water with stirring. Add sucrose (30 g/L) and vitamins if not pre-included. Adjust pH to 5.7–5.8 with 1M KOH. Add gelling agent if needed. Make up to 1 L. Autoclave at 121 °C, 20 min.

💡 MS salts alone have very little buffering — add 0.5 g/L MES buffer if your medium drifts below pH 5.5 during culture.