Cloning: Cuttings, Tissue Culture and Adult Cell Cloning
A clone is an organism with the same genome as another, and plants have been making them without help for as long as there have been plants. Doing it from an adult animal cell is harder because the cell has to be persuaded to forget what it had become.
What a learner can do afterwards
- Describe how a cutting and a tissue culture each produce clones, and say which one scales
- Outline adult cell cloning as nuclear transfer into an enucleated egg
- Give one reason cloning is useful and one risk that follows from a population having no genetic variation
1 · Read
A clone is an organism with the same genome as another, and plants have made them without help for ages. Snip a stem with a few buds, stick it in soil, and hormones at the cut end grow roots. You get a plant identical to the parent: cheap and simple, but slow to scale.
Tissue culture runs the same trick at industrial speed. Tiny pieces of shoot tip grow on sterile jelly into thousands of identical plantlets. Farmers clone prize fruit trees by grafting and multiply elite orchids this way. The motive is one: keep a winning genome exactly as it is, skipping the shuffle of seeds.
Animals cannot regrow from cuttings, so cloning one means nuclear transfer. Move the nucleus of an adult body cell into an egg emptied of its own DNA, and the rebuilt egg develops with the donor genes only. Dolly the sheep proved adult DNA still holds the full instruction set after years of specialised work.
Cloning is always a trade. Uniformity pays today while diversity insures tomorrow: a field of identical plants is a feast for any pest that cracks its defences, since no individual carries a different resistance gene. Note the scale too: pasting one gene into bacteria for insulin copies a paragraph, while rebuilding Dolly reprinted the book.
Cuttings copy cheaply, culture copies fast, nuclear transfer copies animals, and sameness always trades against safety.
2 · Watch
Take it off screen
Where it sits
This opens up
Nothing builds on it yet.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.