One of a Kind: The Wonders of Biodiversity

The plant we have is of the Brassica olercea species, and is more specifically collards. Our collards are pretty big, with our biggest at almost two feet tall. They have thick green leaves and are very smooth. They also have thick white-ish stalks running through the long and wide leaves. To the average person, it resembles the outer leaves of cabbage.  All of our plants have been unfortunately nibbled on by bugs, and are riddled with holes.

It is difficult to determine anything about the parent plants before these. How am I supposed to know if some traits that our plants have our genetic, or if they are really just reactions to their environment? For example, our plants vary greatly in size. One of our plants is almost two feet tall, while another is a modest 17 inches. I could infer that there was one very large plant and one small as the parent plants, but I don’t have much to put behind that idea. Their sizing differences could just as easily be related to the competitors and their environment. My best guess is that the parent plants looked very similar to our plants, and had very slight variation.

I could predict the traits of my plants’ offspring by using punnett squares if I knew the parent plants’ genes. Punnett squares would basically compare each parent plants dominant and recessive traits and then show the resulting chance of which traits (genotypes)  the offspring would have. The baby plants would acquire these traits from the parents’ sex cells. The parents’ sex cells contain chromosomes that have genetic information. During meiosis, the sex cells duplicate and split, eventually creating more sex cells (gametes) with a “blend” of traits from each parent’s cells. My plant will then pass its genetic information on to its offspring in the same way. It will give its traits and other plants traits to create a new seed.  My plant’s offspring will not look just like it, because its offspring will be a mix of its traits and the other parent plant’s traits. Some of my plant’s traits will be recessive, leading it be not exactly like either of its parent, are its sister plants.

Even though the the plants of Brassica olercea are closely related, many look very different. This due to several reasons. One is that they have grown in different places. The ancestral plant was probably taken to places over the world, which would lead each plant to adapt in its own way to survive in the environment it was in. The ancestral plant was native to western and southern coastal Europe, but is now grown in many different places. Another reason is that early genetic mutations may have caused differences in the original plant, which would then be passed down to all the plants after it. This also shows how all of our plants came from the same species.