Question

A significant component of breeding experimentation directly or indirectly involves anatomical characters. Please explain. This question is for a botany module, specifically plant anatomy, structure and function so the answer needs to pertain to that please :)

Answer 1

Plant breeding, intra-specific or inter-specific has remained a particular area of interest for humans for a long time. It serves the purpose of commercial importance, ornamental values as well as improving/altering the quality of product obtained from a plant. Thus, in order to achieve a successful plant breeding product, one must make it sure that the produce survives. This can be performed simply by ensuring that the anatomical features of the two sources of plant either match or show some connectivity towards each other.

This can be understood by a simple example of rearing rose plants of different varities. These roses belong to the same species and hence have very high anatomical matching. However, a plant rearer still needs to make it sure that while grafting an unknown rose species stem over the host rose stem, the vascular bundles of the two plant sources must come into direct contact so that the graft might not get devoid of nutrition and die. Hence, a degree of matching of the anatomical features (vascular bundle in this case) is extremely vital for plant rearing.

This simple example explains the necessity of matching the anatomical features. Other examples include inter-specific rearing of fruit plants, ornamental rearing of flowers, enhancing the quality of wood in some timber-trees etc.