From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Dec 07 2002 - 14:04:50 MST
On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Barbara Lamar wrote:
> The success rate is quite different with multicellular plants. For example,
> one of the most robust plants in my country garden is a Fortune's Double
> Yellow rose <http://www.rdrop.com/~paul/teas/fortunes.html >. Each of the
> thousands of Fortune's Double Yellow now in existence is a clone descended
> from a plant taken from China to England in 1845, at which time it was
> thought to be already quite an old variety.
Barbara,
The problem is that one has to be careful of the selection effect here.
As far as I know when one "clones" plants one takes a cutting that may
consist of trillions (or more) cells. So amongst those cells there
may certainly be some with relatively "perfect" genomes that allow
the regrowth of a complete plant. I believe this is related to
stochastic developmental processes and I think this is discussed in
"Chance, Development and Aging" by Finch and Kirkwood (I've heard
Finch speak about this once, though haven't yet read the book).
It explains why you can have identical twins and yet they may still
have some significant variance in the diseases they develop and their
age at death.
I would be very interested in the success rate of cloning plants
from single cells as it might contribute significantly to the debate
Joao and I have been having.
Perhaps we could get Doug to give up the fly experiments and
switch to plant cloning instead.... :-)
Robert
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