Advantage of cloning?

[Pat]

aussie, I don't think cuttings to grow a plant is cloning. Just like grafting is not cloning. Cloning is when you take a plant cell and stimulate and or manipulate it such that it begins to replicate and produce tissue and ideally a new plant.

Back in the 60's the primitive approaches to cloning, trying to grow a plant from a single cell of a "parent" (or donor plant) often resulted in some sort of lump of tissue and not a viable plant. We've come a long way baby!

Intelligent Design: I strongly believe in intelligent design. I also strongly believe that evolutiion IS intellligent design!!

Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[egon]

Macintosh apples, the kink you eat are all from the same original tree.

Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Egon, Sounds, well, Kinky!

Grapes are propagated through cuttings which also IS NOT cloning but you end up with an entire vineyard that is populated with the EXACT same plants which will produce the exact same grapes. Wonderful stuff until something comes along that can cause that plant a problem and then the whole vineyard is in danger. Ahh, the pros and cons of biodiversity.

Trivia question of the day: A navel (belly button) is the point where the offspring is connected to the mother by an umbilicus. If some sort of cloning such as is often depicted in Sci Fi were actually able to successfully grow a human would you be able to easily ID them at the beach due to their lack of a belly button?

Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[egon]

Plastic surgery.

Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Egon, A favorite line from the Dustin Hoffman movie, "The Graduate."

"...just one word, plastic."

Oh, plastic surgery. Yes, but to give a clone an ersatz navel or to elliminate someone's natural navel for the smooth unblimished look?

Imagine the Sports Illustrated swim suit edition with no navels.

Off topic comment: Just finished watching the Rose Parade and the taped replay. I think Oklahoma made quite a splash. I liked the all too short exposure of the B-2 escourted by the two Raptors (F-22) but that spectacular moment was totally eclipsed when the gift wrapped box on the Oklahoma float opened up and like a child's jack-in-the-box springing up, out came THE ROCKET MAN wearing his rocket pack who then took off and flew down the parade route to a near perfect landing.

Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[egon]

I have never seen the swimsuit edition. Heard about it though.

Our TV has not been activated today. Stoking the fire, a comfortable black chair, view of the bird feeder and a book by Dale Brown about exotic aircraft and satellite systems have taken up almost all my time. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Egon, I think it is pretty funny that the stuff that I was exposed to that required permanently abridging my rights under the constitution is now openly published in Jane's and other pubs like the one you are reading on satellites. Overhead assets, wonderful stuff. I can neither confirm nor deny the existance of certain satellites much less their capabilities even though some of my digraphs are quite suggestive. This after the stuff is in news papers, magazines, and movies.

The theory being that somewhere there just may still be someone who doesn't know for sure the exact parameters and confirming or denying any attributes or figures of merit would allow someone to reverese engineer the performance capability.

Meanwhile, it makes for interesting reading for a fan such as yourself.

Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[lovethesticks]

Yes MacIntoshs are all from the same original tree. But one grown in Michigan does not taste the same as one grown in Connecticut. I loved eating Gravenstein apples in Washington State, but the ones grown in Michigan lack the flavor, "bite" and size of the ones in Washington. Would a clone be a clone if raised in a different environment? I'll let the intelligent people sort that one out. Chris

[Pat]

Yet more evidence brought to bear in the "NATURE" vs "NURTURE" debate! The environment in the widest sense of he word makes the difference. The weather, climate, soil, and all factors involving the health and welfare of the tree have a potential effect on the fruit.

The genetics of the cuttings used for grafting are a pattern, a set of instructions of how to assemble the available ingredients into a tree and its fruit and there are many factors that have influence over the final resultant fruit.

The good news is that by grafting you are actually getting a tree that is a part of the original tree, not a daughter tree but an actual part of the original tree. There are no introduced genetic differences or errors like you could get by planting seeds produced by the original tree. All those trees are actually just widely separated pieces of the same tree. This gets arouind the Xerox copy of a Xerox copy problem for the most part. YOu can still have replicative mutations when new cells are formed but this is a lower order source of defect as compared to cloning.

Now if you want to talk about risk... If some disease comes along that is really bad news for one of the trees it is potentially a real killer for any/all of the trees that are exposed.

Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[jdc40]

Pat, I have a "what if" question. If everthing is kept in balance due to the process of evolution and we start cloning on a large basis will that effect evolution, and if so what happens when everything cloned is attacked by some disease. I know that cloning isn't meant for cloning the elk, bear, whitetail, bass, trout and so on, but that is "what if".

Hope everybody had a Happy New Year, jerry