Cloning

Question 1

How can plants be cloned?

Answer 1

Taking cuttings

Tissue culture

Question 2

Explain how cloning by taking cuttings happens

Answer 2

Gardeners can take cuttings from good parent plants, and then plant them to produce genetically identical copies (clones) of the parent plant

→ These plants can be produced quickly and cheaply

Question 3

Explain how tissue culture produces clones of plants?

Answer 3

A few plant cells are put into a growth medium with hormones, and they grow into new plants - clones of the parent plant

→These plants can be made very quickly, in very little spaces and be grown all year

Question 4

How can animals be cloned?

Answer 4

Embryo cloning

Adult cell/fusion cloning

Question 5

Why is animal cloning done?

Answer 5

• Farm animal may produce good milk/furs/meat
• Save a species from extinction
• Keep a beloved pet

Question 6

Explain how Emryo transplants happen?

Answer 6

• Eggs are collected from a female and sperm from a male
• The sperm and egg are fertilised in a petri dish
• Zygote divides and starts to produce embryo
• The embryo is split into individual cells
• Each individual cell forms into an embryo
• The embryo gets implanted into a surrogate
• All the offspring are clones of eachother → they are genetically identical

Question 7

Explain how adult cell cloning works?

Answer 7

• Take an unfertalised egg from Sheep A and a normal adult body cell from Sheep B
• We remove the nucleus from the egg from Sheep A and discard it and we remove the nucleus from the body cell from Sheep B anddispose of the rest of the cell
• A small electric shock fuses the nucleus into the empty egg cell
• The cell now divides and forms an embryo
• This is implanted into a surrogate sheep
• The offspring is genetically identical to Sheep B

Question 8

Some concerns surrounding cloning?

Answer 8

• You get a reduced gene pool - as there are fewer different alleles in a population
  
  • If a population are closely related and a new disease appears, they could all be wiped out (as there may be no allele in the population giving resistance to the disease
• Its possible cloned animals may not be as healthy as normal animals
• Some worry that humans might be cloned (Any successes may follow many unsuccessful attempts where severly disabled children were born)

Question 9

Advantages of cloning?

Answer 9

• Quickly gets a lot of ‘ideal’ offspring
• The study of animal clones could lead to a greater understanding of the development of the embryo, and of ageing and age-related disorders
• Could be used to help preserve endangered species