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Does an anther on a plant have a double set of chromosomes?

Monoploidy and artificial chromosomes?

  • I know that having a triploid set of chromatids will kill an organism. I figure a monoploid set will do the same. But what if the monoploid chromatid weren't important to the plant's survival? i.e. if you were to add a new chromatid to an apple tree that makes blue dye or something. Would that have any effect on the plant's life, or does it follow that only half of the cells would make blue dye and nothing else would happen?

  • Answer:

    This is entirely dependent on the organism. Generally speaking, the more complicated the organism, the larger the effect of of the ____ploidy on that organism. For instance, most monoploidy and polyploidy humans do not survive embryonic development. However, many genetisists work with polyploidy plants. Corn crops, for instance, that are polyploidy tend to grow bigger ears of corn. Any kind of ploidy will effect an organisms life, the question is to what degree. It depends entirely on what genes are being over or under expressed and how important those genes are to the organism.

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Polyploidy is only a problem for animals (and not all animals either): plants can become polyploid without any problems at all. In fact, such events are common, and are an important mechanism for producing new varieties of plants. The stuff you are talking about - inserting a new chromosome - is basically what genetic engineering is about, except they just intruduce new genes into existing chromosomes, they don't add whole new chromosomes. The organisms they produce are called "transgenic organisms" Either way - adding a whole new chromosome, or adding just some genes - will change the genes present in *every* cell of the organism (because you insert the gene into a single cell, which you then clone a new organism from). So if you added a "blue pigment" gene into an apple tree, then all the cells will have the gene. Whether all the cells actually make the gene product is controlled by other processes: not all the genes in your body produce insulin, for example. So you can ensure the gene is turned on in all cells, or only some cells, by controlling the gene promoters - regions of DNA near the gene which are bound by transcription factors to turn the gene "on". Different promoters are turned on in different cells, and some are turned on in all cells.

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