Plants cloned for the first time as seeds

Plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds. The research by UC Davis plant scientists and their international collaborators, published February 18 in the journal Science, is a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favourable traits from generation to generation.

Most successful crop varieties are hybrids, said Simon Chan, assistant professor of plant biology at UC Davis and an author of the paper. But when hybrids go through sexual reproduction, their traits, such as fruit size or frost resistance, get scrambled and may be lost. "We're trying to make a hybrid that breeds true," Chan said, so that plants grown from the seed would be genetically identical to one parent.

Some plants, especially fruit trees, can be cloned from cuttings, but this approach is impractical for most crops. Other plants, especially weeds such as hawkweed and dandelions, can produce true seeds that are clones of themselves without sexual reproduction a still poorly understood process called apomixis. Read more ...

This blog is written by Martin Little The Global Miller, published and supported by the GFMT Magazine from Perendale Publishers.