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snoopervisor t1_j6z8zm1 wrote

Plants grew from cuttings will be as new young plants. Clones of the old plant. Depending on what was the cause of the original plant to look bad after a while, they may or may not behave the same. The old plant could be ill, or have parasites, or just suboptimal conditions for a period of time. Those don't pass to new plants. But genetics does.

Plants can be cloned indefinitely. Potatoes are clones. Most of bushes you see in the gardens.

Plants from seeds are never the same genetically. If you collected the seeds from your plant, the new plants will probably be very different from the original. If you bought seeds of the same type and variety, they won't be the same, but very, very close.

You see, many seeds are now protected from being stolen. If there is an F1 mark somewhere on the package, you know they are. It's a genetic trick. They pick two selected (very long process) plants that, when crossed (mated), produce offspring of good properties. Then they use the two plants (or their clones) to produce the F1 seeds for selling. All the plants from these seeds are very similar, and have similar genetic material, few differences in genes' versions. But their seeds in turn will have very mixed up genetic material, so the resulting plants will be quite different to each other. Reverse engineering from that is almost impossible. Even harder than starting from scratch. That's how the protection works.

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Maximum-Mixture6158 t1_j6zig97 wrote

Vegetative reproduction is a kind of asexual reproduction in which structures or any part of the plant is capable to develop a completely new plant, that is genetically identical to the parent plant. The writer above had an autocorrect. The majority of plants breed true, their young are reasonably identical to them. And it sounds like F1 is GMO, genetically modified. Try to avoid this. They may harm bee populations or butterflies. The long term effects are unknown.

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BubbaL0vesKale t1_j6zml1u wrote

F1 hybrids are NOT the same as GMO. Think of an F1 hybrid as similar to breeding two different dog breeds together. So instead of golden retriever parents = golden retriever puppy we have golden mom + poodle dad = golden doodle puppy.

These F1 hybrid varieties come from the same old sexual reproductive process that all plants go through, it's just that we (humans) select which 2 varieties to breed together.

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za419 t1_j70s98x wrote

GMO plants are not dangerous to insects unless explicitly made to be.

F1 just means they're first generation hybrids - the children of two "purebred" plants, if you will. If you choose the parents well, you can get fairly low variation - because the parents have known and predictable genetics.

Imagine you're a botanist working for a commercial nursery. One of your company's most popular offerings is a lovely little potted plant. It can either grow a red flower or a white flower, with leaves that are either waxy or fuzzy. The way the genetics work is that red flowers and fuzzy leaves are dominant traits - They win over waxy or white flowers. The powers that be inform you that customers love growing these plants from seed, but they love the uncommon red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants even more! So they want to offer seed packets that grow into red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants - But how can you know what the seed will grow into ahead of time??

Well, you might decide to be clever. You put in lots of effort and careful labor, and you come up with one plant that has, as close as possible, all the white flowering genes squeezed out, along with all the fuzzy leaved ones, and another that's exactly the opposite - No red flowering or waxy genes. When you breed these two plants together you'll tend to get lots of seeds that have both sets of genes, and because of how the genetics work that means almost all the seeds will be red flowered and fuzzy leaved! Maybe an occasional plant will glitch out and have pink flowers or stunted fuzz, but you can offer a pack of ten seeds and say nine of them will grow to flower red and have fuzzy leaves. Those plants are F1 hybrids - If a customer takes them and breeds them together trying to make more seed though, suddenly waxy leaves and white flowers will start appearing out of nowhere, because those genes are still there, just being overridden. You've maintained enough genetic variety for those traits to survive while also creating an entire generation of plants that doesn't have them.

GMO happens when those damned marketing guys butt in, and so management comes and tells you they signed a big contract with Northwestern University and they need you to grow a bunch of plants with purple flowers. "But they don't grow purple flowers, only red and white!" you protest, to no avail - In fact, that just puts dollar signs in their eyes at the thought of being the only ones to offer this plant with purple flowers.

Luckily, this is lucrative enough to them that you get a blank check to make it happen, and you take it to people with the right equipment and skills to do the same thing you did with careful crossbreeding, only more specifically and without the restriction that it has to actually be possible. They take your plant, then they grab a T. ionantha and an African violet, and set to work.

They find the specific sections of each plant's genes that produce purple pigment in flowers, and snip those out. Throw them in a machine, and swiftly they have millions of copies of each gene - And with the power of Science, they edit the genes of your plants and stick the code for purple flowers from each donor into white flowering plants. Turns out, the violet gene works better, so they manufacture a bunch of those, and next thing you know, you're growing these precious plants with aggressively purple flowers that they haven't ever been able to grow before.

Those are GMO flowers. They could also engineer them to produce their own antifungals so they don't rot as easily, or be super fancy and pricey and push the envelope of science forward by editing in the genes from that T. ionantha that code for its method of photosynthesis, so your plants now require less water.

But the edits they make are specific - You get the code for violet pigment, but not anything else from the violet.

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