About

Mission Beach Tissue Culture Laboratory is Australia’s only dedicated papaw tissue culture propagator.  The laboratory was established in 2006 by directors Steve and Denise Lavis, with support from an Australian Government New Industries Development Grant.

Tissue culture propagation of papaw fruit is a new industry to Australia, with MBTCL being the only purpose built papaw tissue culture laboratory in the continent. 

Because of this, MBTCL is uniquely placed to provide Australian papaw growers with a reliable and best practice means of cultivating papaw plantlets that are disease free, pest resistant, environmentally friendly,  fast growing and able to be tailored to rapidly address changing consumer demands.

As well as pioneering the tissue culture propagation of papaws, we are pioneering the use of perlite media, rather than agar in which to grow the fruit and plan to extend our research to pineapple, teak and banana tissue culture propagation upon the successful commercialisation of our papaw project.

We hope you find our website informative and interesting and invite you to contact us if you have any questions, or would like to find out more about this exciting new Australian industry.