What are the advantages of tissue culture methods over conventional methods of plant breeding in crop improvement programmes?

Advantages of tissue culture method:

• Conventional breeding methods are very slow and tedious. But tissue culture is very fast as a large number of plants can be grown in a short period of time.
• The desired characteristics are not necessarily present in the progeny of two superior parents that have been artificially crossed in a conventional plant breeding programme. But, in tissue culture all the plants in the progeny have the same superior characteristics like the parent.
• Tissue culture produces thousands of exact copies of plants together which is not possible in conventional breeding.
• Conventional breeding requires seeds or other propagative parts. But in tissue culture a small piece of plant known as explant is sufficient.
• By apical meristem culture disease free clones can be created.
• By haploid culture purelines can be produced, while in conventional breeding it takes a number of generations of inbreeding.