Dory's Biology Questions Thread

[GenesForLife]

Reporters can be selective, Dory, but not always, because in cases where you're using reporters to study gene expression in a system, you aren't selecting anything, if the reporter, however, produces antibiotic resistance or something, that may be selective.

[Dory]

Let's drop gene reporters for now. While fascinating, I've been looking up the nervous system again and then I saw this curious chart...

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/gif/actionp1.gif

I then wondered how far can action potentials get to in neurons. Can they go over 30 milivolts?

[Dory]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

[Pappa]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Well in the strictest sense, some people would argue that it's not a new individual, and it's certainly not a genetically distinct individual. But really, does it matter? Twins are genetically identical, but we consider them individuals.

[Dory]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Well in the strictest sense, some people would argue that it's not a new individual, and it's certainly not a genetically distinct individual. But really, does it matter? Twins are genetically identical, but we consider them individuals.

Ah...so it's not reproductive in a way...wait, are all of these "new individuals" connected via roots or leaves...etc?

[Pappa]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Well in the strictest sense, some people would argue that it's not a new individual, and it's certainly not a genetically distinct individual. But really, does it matter? Twins are genetically identical, but we consider them individuals.

Ah...so it's not reproductive in a way...wait, are all of these "new individuals" connected via roots or leaves...etc?

It can get a bit messy when you're thinking about specific examples. Is a field of grass one organism (assume for a moment every piece was still physically joined to every other)? Is a load of seaweed one organism, they might be physically seperate, but they float around together and bunch up occasionally and all grew from the same cell?

I'm sure people could come out with lots of examples. Professional biologists argue about the precise definitions and I don't think there's a widely accepted single definition of what an organism is.

[Dory]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Well in the strictest sense, some people would argue that it's not a new individual, and it's certainly not a genetically distinct individual. But really, does it matter? Twins are genetically identical, but we consider them individuals.

Ah...so it's not reproductive in a way...wait, are all of these "new individuals" connected via roots or leaves...etc?

It can get a bit messy when you're thinking about specific examples. Is a field of grass one organism (assume for a moment every piece was still physically joined to every other)? Is a load of seaweed one organism, they might be physically seperate, but they float around together and bunch up occasionally and all grew from the same cell?

I'm sure people could come out with lots of examples. Professional biologists argue about the precise definitions and I don't think there's a widely accepted single definition of what an organism is.

Interesting. I never thought about grass. Are grass considered vegetative growth?

[Pappa]

Interesting. I never thought about grass. Are grass considered vegetative growth?

The often propagate asexually (by offsets, or whatever they're called with grasses) as well as sexually. It could be theoretically possible to have an entire field that was technically one single organism.

[Dory]

Interesting. I never thought about grass. Are grass considered vegetative growth?

The often propagate asexually (by offsets, or whatever they're called with grasses) as well as sexually. It could be theoretically possible to have an entire field that was technically one single organism.

Awesome! Do many plants reproduce asexually? I do know that most reproduce sexually and I know the megaspore/microspore/seed/zygote stuff with all the different types of plants (including seedless vascular plants, and nonvascular plants which just have a more water-needing reproductive systems, but they got spores unlike the vegetative growers).

[Pappa]

Interesting. I never thought about grass. Are grass considered vegetative growth?

The often propagate asexually (by offsets, or whatever they're called with grasses) as well as sexually. It could be theoretically possible to have an entire field that was technically one single organism.

Awesome! Do many plants reproduce asexually? I do know that most reproduce sexually and I know the megaspore/microspore/seed/zygote stuff with all the different types of plants (including seedless vascular plants, and nonvascular plants which just have a more water-needing reproductive systems, but they got spores unlike the vegetative growers).

Almost all plants are able to reproduce asexually under the right conditions. Gardeners and professional growers take advantage of it all the time by taking cuttings. That's the way clones are produced. You can do it easily with any herb, just cut off a section of stem and drop the cut end in water. Trees and other woody plants usually need moist soil or similar rather than water. Cacti do best in dry sand. Some plants grow well from leaf cuttings, and micropropagation is used in labs all over the world.

[mistermack]

The line between reproduction and clones is often blurred. If you produced a "conjoined" twin, that grew on you, would you call it reproduction, while it was still attached?
That's what lots of plants do.
The most spectacular of all is the aspen, which sends up shoots from it's roots, resulting in huge groves of trees, all connected by the roots and genetically identical.
These groves have been studied and are considered by some to be the oldest actively living single organism in the world, at up to 80,000 years old!
If the connection was above ground by a branched trunk, we would have no hesitation in calling it one single tree.
.

[GenesForLife]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Because of totipotent meristematic tissue, Dory, which can produce all the tissues that constitute a plant, in animals like us, however, totipotency is often lost after the cells during embryo development commit themselves to differentiation, after which they're just pluripotent, I actually did that in the plant tissue culture lab at college, Dory

[mistermack]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Because of totipotent meristematic tissue, Dory, which can produce all the tissues that constitute a plant, in animals like us, however, totipotency is often lost after the cells during embryo development commit themselves to differentiation, after which they're just pluripotent, I actually did that in the plant tissue culture lab at college, Dory

That's interesting. They must have some way around it in the lab though, as they're managing to clone higher mammals now.
We must be fooling the pluripotent cell into acting totipotently. ( is that a word? ).
.

[GenesForLife]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Because of totipotent meristematic tissue, Dory, which can produce all the tissues that constitute a plant, in animals like us, however, totipotency is often lost after the cells during embryo development commit themselves to differentiation, after which they're just pluripotent, I actually did that in the plant tissue culture lab at college, Dory

That's interesting. They must have some way around it in the lab though, as they're managing to clone higher mammals now.
We must be fooling the pluripotent cell into acting totipotently. ( is that a word? ).
.

When cloning animals, we take an egg cell, and replace the nucleus with one taken from the somatic cells of the animal that is being cloned, the egg cell , upon implantation, develops into an embryo and then onto the cloned animal, embryos at the blastocyst stage have totipotent cells.

[Dory]

Another Question

I don't understand how vegetative growth is possible. How could possibly new plant "individuals" arise or be obtained without production of seeds or spores? It just doesn't make sense to me!

Because of totipotent meristematic tissue, Dory, which can produce all the tissues that constitute a plant, in animals like us, however, totipotency is often lost after the cells during embryo development commit themselves to differentiation, after which they're just pluripotent, I actually did that in the plant tissue culture lab at college, Dory

That's so cool. You know how to basically make a plant clone itself using its own totipotent meristematic tissues?