Meh, I've run sugarless mediums like in the case of psylosybin cultivation, you can have contamination take hold if the medium has sugar in it or not. It might decrease the likelyhood of infection, so point taken.
Actually the method is not like mushroom cultivation, the byproduct of fungi is CO2, and it does not take much airflow, in fact on the Brown Rice Flour (BRF) cakes I make I do not expose them to circulating air until a fruiting body shows.
So back to "photoautotropic propagation," the idea is that CO2, is the food versus Sucrose in the agar. If we look at Chieri Kubota's work she says that in vitro propagation is slow due to the limited ammount of co2 in vitro. And I somewhat agree after looking at the time it takes from Stage 1 to plant hardening in Wang's or Scroggins work on in vitro cultivation. Off the top of my head from explant to hardened plant takes somewhere around 6 weeks.
Well at the very least we could flood a laminar booth with a high level of co2 when inserting explants into the desired medium. In Kubota's work it looks like there is more mass vs regular explants. And needless to say co2 we know is a basic building block of mass. I'm now sure how I would implement this and mantain a sterile culture at the same time flowing co2 over explants in vitro, not to mention the cost of concentrated co2, as in a compressed cylinder might push me away from going this route.
The abstract you mention is wang's 2009 study on the micropropagation of hemp... Cannabis Sativa L. Same thing if you ask me as the typical cannabis hybrids. The success rate after Stage 3 to hardened plants is 99%.
Well I'm researching this now, I think I'm going to go commercial, and provide clones to commercial grow ops.. I'm looking at pushing clones out in numbers like 200-500 clones a month.
At the very least I've learned a bit, from Kubota's work, I could use the co2 to optimize growth in my explants.
I'll continue to at least look into the subject.
Like.. good stuff man...