[live resin]

Many large scale established cultivation operations have yet to adopt tissue culture, which doesn't make any sense to me even at the current unit cost. I was talking with the owner of a 75,000 sq ft operation being built out in Oakland right now, and he wasn't interested in doing a tissue culture lab in Phase 1 of their buildout. I spoke with their long-established sister operation in Denver, and their Director of Cultivation stated they weren't doing tissue culture either because "we couldn't find a space in our facility that would be sterile." However, operations like Dark Heart Nursery have been doing micropropagation for a while, albeit with an astronomically high labor cost.

I was hoping the forum could come up with some cost saving measures. Labor and media constitute well over half of operational costs so whether its cheaper alternatives to MS media and agar, bulk-handling techniques, or development of cheaper robots with laser cutters and machine vision, any info on making tissue culture more cost effective will benefit the whole industry.

Anyone currently running a TS Lab, how do you make your workflow fast and efficient?

[Only Ornamental]

Cheaper than MS and agar? Unlikely, it's already quite cheap and well proven. After all, it's just inorganic salts and the advantage and the price of agar are still among the best options you have. There are alternatives but these are meant to be fully defined and of high purity and not a mixture which is slightly different from batch to batch. Hence, these are usually more expensive and often less favourable regarding texture, handling, stability/longevity...
Robots are a great tool to reduce manpower and work-hours but only if you have a high enough throughput. The best option here to lower cost is time. Wait a few years and the machines get smaller, faster, cheaper LoL.
Many go from reusable flasks and pipettes to single use plastic equipment which comes already sterilised. It's usually more expensive but you save time, manpower, and reduce the risk of contamination. Better flasks with built-in air filters are great to reduce contamination even further but cost more than old school cotton plugs.
Lasers and optics etc. are expensive (nowadays with LED techniques being standard, they cost a lot less than 10 years ago, but still) but are faster, more precise, and produce less waste (at least regarding the culture flasks and plant material, running costs like rinsing fluids, maintenance, replacement parts, time till the mechanic arrive can be considerable!). They only become advantageous when dealing with high numbers and high throughput. Good training and a few cheap workers chopping cell lumps and changing bottles can cost less than a highly trained technician running sophisticate software on a complex robot .

I see a problem with plant tissue culture and high throughput: Do you need tissue culture for reproduction/clones? These take more time (and more plant hormones and chemicals) to grow into useful plants than simply taking cuttings, I suppose. It works great with orchids but those who have their costs low are those who grow in nurseries in cheap labour countries like Thailand.
If it's for maintenance, then the numbers might be high but the throughput is low and all the cell lumps do is wasting resources and growing too fast keeping you busy changing media and removing/ditching excessively grown tissues.
Growing tissues without much light would save electricity and slow down growth but if that would be enough?
Suspension cell culture would be nice but it's tricky with plants... doesn't always work and it's not always possible to turn them back into fully functional plants (at least not without some effort).