One of a Kind: The Wonders of Biodiversity

The plant my group experimented with were collards, of the species brassica oleracea.  Our plants have grown to incredible size, some being as tall as twenty-two inches tall.  Their leaves are almost as long as their stems, but there are many holes in their leaves, indicating pests that may be using our plants as food.

We can see from the appearances of our biggest plants that their parents were very large, or that perhaps one of their parents was large, and both had recessive genes that created the few huge plants in our garden.  Ways that we could predict our plants’ offspring would be to see the genotypes that two mating plants have, then create a Punnett square to predict the genotypes of their offspring.  The offspring would get these genotype mixes because of the mixing of genes in their sex cells, which happens during meiosis (which differs from mitosis because meiosis purposefully assorts paternal and maternal genes in a random way, instead of an exact copy of genes).  Of course, this means that the baby plants will not look exactly like their parents, although such an occurrence is technically possible.

Even though every single team’s plants are the exact same species, they all look incredibly different.  This is because of the many, many possible alleles for the genes of each plant.  Unlike our genes, whose possible alleles are relatively limited, species like brassica oleracea have so many possible genetic combinations, that the phenotypes of these variations make it appear like the plants aren’t related at all!

The ancestor plant, wild brassica oleraceadoes not look anything like our team’s plants, or like the other teams’ plants, yet they are all related to this plant.  The original plant’s changes may have been due to breeding with plants of the same species that may have had recessive genes that appeared in its offspring.  The two plants’ offspring would have phenotypes that were a mix of their parents’ phenotypes, and through generations, the qualities of the brassica oleracea would become harder to see in its children plants.