Question

What are some clones?

Answer 1

It is a type of tissue culture where fragments of a plant are artificially cultured under favorable conditions for it to multiply and grow. It is prepared by micropropagation and then cultured to form multiple copies of the suitable varieties of the desired crop.

Complete answer:
The term soma refers to non-germinal cells and clones mean making exact copies. Therefore, some clones are clones created from the parts of the non-germinal cells.
Plants produced by tissue culture are called clones. The name is derived from the thought that plants are genetically identical. These clones are generally produced from somatic cells. Somatic cells undergo mitosis which is equational division so the cells getting developed have identical genetic material.
Micropropagation is a technique of producing clones by tissue culture, which has technically four major steps:
-Selection of mother plant- Before cloning any cell, one must decide the best quality of the mother plant. It should be the one with the best of genes so that the clone also contains the identical gene set.
-Multiplication- It is done using different methods and media but the ultimate goal is culturing the tissue of the mother plant, to make its copies.
-Rooting and acclimatization- The tissue which is cultured in the media is now planted in the nursery for making it aware of the environment and to evaluate its growth there.
-Transfer new plant to soil- After the plant has successfully shown results in the nursery, they are then released in the market. People who buy them plant them in new soil.
This method is used to determine the totipotency of the parent plant. It is the ability to regenerate the whole plant from any part of the parent plant. Pieces of leaves, stems, roots can be used to generate a new plant if the correct ingredients are provided.

Note:
Though clones are said to exact copies of the parent plant, there are still variations. These variants are known as somaclonal variants. Here the variation can be either genotypic due to chromosomal rearrangement or phenotypic due to epigenesis. Another factor that leads to the generation of somaclonal variants is the change in chromosome number or polyploidy.