Asexual reproduction🧐
Plants can make identical copies (clones) of themselves. Many plants have ways of increasing their numbers by asexual reproduction – new plants are created by repeated cell division:
A potato plant can produce many tubers, each of which can grow into a new plant.
- Strawberry plants and spider plants produce long stems with tiny plants on the end. These runners can produce several new plants from one parent.
It's fairly easy to artificially produce new plants by taking a cutting, and waiting for the cutting to develop new roots and leaves.
The stages of cloning
In 1996 the first large animal was cloned. It was called Dolly, the sheep. Many attempts had been made before the stages of cloning were properly understood. The stages include:
- Removal of diploid nucleus from a body cell
- Enucleation, or removal, of egg cell
- Insertion of diploid nucleus into enucleated egg cell
- Stimulation of the diploid nucleus to divide by mitosis
How Dolly the sheep was cloned- This is a common example given in I/GCSE Biology🐑
In this famous example of cloning, an ordinary cell was used to replace the nucleus of an egg cell, so all of Dolly's cells had identical DNA to the one parent that donated the cell. This form of cloning produced a single, genetically identical, offspring.
Reference: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wendy-Dean/publication/7486820/figure/fig1/AS:277918010888201@1443272225922/The-method-used-to-create-Dolly-the-sheep-The-nuclear-material-was-removed-from-an.png
Drafted by Catrina (Biology)