Tobacco Plant Vs Process, Is There A Botanist In The House?
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Taxonomy is not very straight forward, as I have mentioned earlier, even biologists do not have a definition of what makes a species. We make assumption and agreements to make life easier. Taxonomy tries to order organisms to create some sort of order, but nature does not like to be put into orderly things. Nature is messy, very messy. Just know that perhaps over 50% of our genome (DNA) is completely useless and is basically a graveyard of dead viruses. Now back to the taxonomy.... what breeders generally do is that they have a genetic 'fingerprint' of their cultivar. Each cultivar or variety has its own unique fingerprint(small mutations scattered in the genome, unique to that cultivar). So if you like up the genetic profile of virginia cultivars, you will see they have many things in common except for a few specific mutations. If you would compare it to a burley, you'd most likely see a bigger difference. Kind of like how they can tell with an DNA test if you are the father of the child or not. BUT, as I have said: taxonomy is basically an agreement made between people to easy up things. As Cosmic has already mentioned, breeders will apply the taxonomy that is useful for them: breeding tobacco. Evolutionary biologists might look at it from a different angle, and they will make up their own taxonomy (and they change their minds a lot, taxonomies are constantly changed and discusses and major drastic changes are not unseen.
To answer your question on genetic manipulation. It depends on the plant but in general but one thing stays the same: we work on 'totipotent' tissue. In other words, we work on cells that still have the flexibility to become either shoot or root (like when you make a cutting from a plant, the cells at the cutting are able to create new tissue). This we call 'callus'. Now the first option is to bombard this callus with golden particles to which DNA is attached. We basically shoot it inside of the genome, it is pretty old school and has a lot of error. In the other method, we use a natural occurring bacteria that infects plants called 'agrobacterium'. We can put the DNA we want to insert in the plant inside of this bacteria, and this bacteria will infect the callus and inject the DNA inside of the genome. The new hype is that we create a little artificial protein machine that we can program to do things, so the bacteria inserts this little protein machine inside of the plants. Then, according to how our little protein machine is programmed, it will start editing the genes where we want. In the next generation. This callus will eventually grow into a new plant which will produce seeds. We will then do a selection (remember the law of segregation from Mendel) for the plants that inherited the gene modification but NOT the little machine. So what we have is a plant with edited genes, but no one will be able to tell whether it occurred by a natural mutation or by us.
I did my best to explain it as simple as possible so I hope it is at least a little bit understandable. But don't worry about not understanding the taxonomy, no one does :lol:
To answer your question on genetic manipulation. It depends on the plant but in general but one thing stays the same: we work on 'totipotent' tissue. In other words, we work on cells that still have the flexibility to become either shoot or root (like when you make a cutting from a plant, the cells at the cutting are able to create new tissue). This we call 'callus'. Now the first option is to bombard this callus with golden particles to which DNA is attached. We basically shoot it inside of the genome, it is pretty old school and has a lot of error. In the other method, we use a natural occurring bacteria that infects plants called 'agrobacterium'. We can put the DNA we want to insert in the plant inside of this bacteria, and this bacteria will infect the callus and inject the DNA inside of the genome. The new hype is that we create a little artificial protein machine that we can program to do things, so the bacteria inserts this little protein machine inside of the plants. Then, according to how our little protein machine is programmed, it will start editing the genes where we want. In the next generation. This callus will eventually grow into a new plant which will produce seeds. We will then do a selection (remember the law of segregation from Mendel) for the plants that inherited the gene modification but NOT the little machine. So what we have is a plant with edited genes, but no one will be able to tell whether it occurred by a natural mutation or by us.
I did my best to explain it as simple as possible so I hope it is at least a little bit understandable. But don't worry about not understanding the taxonomy, no one does :lol:
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