Cloning

Question 1

What is vegetative propagation?

Answer 1

Form of asexual reproduction where new, genetically identical individuals develop from non-reproductive tissues of a parent plant, such as its roots, stems and leaves

Question 2

How can plants reproduce asexually using bulbs?

Answer 2

• A bulb forms when a leaf base becomes swollen with stored food, and the bud inside the bulb can form new shoots
• Daffodil plant can do this

Question 3

How can plants reproduce asexually using rhizomes?

Answer 3

• A rhizome is a specialised underground stem that stores food and can produced new vertical shoots from buds along the rhizome
• Marram grass is an example

Question 4

What is a cutting in plant cloning?

Answer 4

• A short section of a stem, root or leaf that is cut from the parent plant and planted in soil
• It can be used to produce a clone of the parent plant

Question 5

What is micropropagation?

Answer 5

• Technique to produce many identical plant clones from a single parent plant using tissue culture
• Meristem cells are useful as they are totipotent

Question 6

What is a tissue culture in microprogagation?

Answer 6

Involves growing plant tissues in a sterile medium with hormones like auxin and cytokines to stimulate cell division and growth

Question 7

What are some advantages and disadvantages of micropropagation?

Answer 7

• • Produces large numbers of plants quickly
• • Enables rapid increase of the numbers of rare or endangered plants
• • Can produce plants that are hard to grow from seeds
• • Expensive and requires skilled technicians
• • Explants and plantelets are vulnerable to infection
• • Genetically identical plants are vulnerable to environmental changes

Question 8

What is a common form of natural cloning in vertebrates like humans?

Answer 8

• Form of monozygotic twins
• Where an early embryo splits to form two genetically identical embryos

Question 9

What is artificial embryo twinning?

Answer 9

Process in which a single early embryo is manually split to produce multiple identical offspring

Question 10

What are some of the disadvantages of animal cloning?

Answer 10

• High cost and technically complex
• Reduces genetic diversity and increases disease risk
• Cloned animals often have shortened lifespans and health issues
• Ethical concerns regarding the destruction of embryos
• SCNT is inefficient, as it takes many ova to produce a single cloned offspring due to high failure rates

Question 11

What are some of the applications of animal cloning?

Answer 11

• Medical research - produces genetically identical animals for drug testing
• Agriculture - can replace animals with desirable characteristics for selective breeding
• Conservation - offers a method to boost the numbers of endangered species