Cloning and Grafting: Making Copies of Living Things

0:00How can a living thing make copies of itself, with no partner?

0:05Strawberry plants send out runners, side stems that root into new plants.

0:11Each new plant is a clone: it has exactly the same genes as its parent.

0:17This is asexual reproduction: one parent, and no sex cells, or gametes, joining.

0:25Potato plants grow tubers, swollen underground stems that can sprout new plants.

0:32Spider plants grow plantlets, tiny copies on long stems that can root on their own.

0:38People make clones too. A cutting is a piece of a plant that grows its own roots.

0:45In grafting, a shoot from one apple tree, the scion, is joined onto the roots of another, the rootstock.

0:54Named apple varieties, like Granny Smith, are grafted this way, so every tree is a clone of one original tree.

1:03Animals can be cloned too. Scientists took a sheep's egg cell and removed its nucleus, which holds the genes.

1:11Then they took the nucleus from an adult sheep's body cell and put it into the egg.

1:17The cell grew into an embryo, and in 1996 Dolly was born, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

1:26These two cuttings have the same genes. But are clones identical in every way?

1:32No. Their environment still shapes them: a cutting in rich soil grows bigger than one in poor soil.

1:41Asexual reproduction makes clones with the same genes, but the environment still shapes them.