Cloning Plants

• Plants can be cloned by cuttings and tissue culture.
• Cuttings are a simple and common method of cloning plants, where a small piece of the plant is removed and dipped in rooting powder, which contains plant hormones, to encourage the plant to develop roots.
• Tissue culture is a method used to clone plants by dividing the plant into hundreds of tiny pieces, each containing a small number of cells, and incubating them with plant hormones.
• The conditions for tissue culture must be sterile because microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi are not wanted.
• Tissue culture is useful in commercial plant nurseries, allowing growers to produce thousands of genetically identical plants quickly and cheaply.
• Because all the plants produced by tissue culture are clones, gardeners can be certain that they will get the characteristics they want, for example, flower color.