Offsets

Offsets

In botany and horticulture Offset is a term used to describe a small virtually complete daughter plant that has been naturally asexually produced on the mother plant. They are clones (e.g."hens and chicks"), meaning that they are genetically identical to the mother plant. In the plant nursery business and gardens they are detached and grown on in order to produce new plants. This is a cheap and simple process for those plants which readily produce offsets as it does not usually require specialist materials and equipment.

Botany of Offsets

Offsets form when meristem regions of plants, such as axillary buds or homologous structures differentiate into a new plant with the ability to become self-sustaining. This is particularly common in species that develop underground storage organs, such as bulbs, corms and tubers. Tulips and lilies are examples of plants, which display offset characteristics by forming cormlets around the original mother corm.

Purpose

When propagating plants to increase a stock of a cultivar, thus seeking identical copies of parent plant, various cloning techniques (asexual reproduction) are used. Offsets is a natural means by which plants may be cloned.

In contrast, when propagating plants to create new cultivars, sexual reproduction through pollination is used to create seeds. The recombination of genes gives rise to offspring plant with similar but distinct offspring genome.

References



Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую

Look at other dictionaries:

  • offsets — off·set || É”fset / É’f n. offshoot; outcome; compensation, counterbalance; printing method in which a printing plate transfers ink to a blanket which in turn transfers the ink to the paper (the plate does not directly touch the paper) v.… …   English contemporary dictionary

  • Time offsets — Часовые пояса Часовые пояса регионы Земли, в которых принято одинаковое местное время. Иногда в понятие часового пояса включается ещё и совпадение даты в этом случае пояса UTC+14 будут считаться различными, хотя в них действует одинаковое время… …   Википедия

  • Time in Mexico — offsets as defined in the federal Law of Time Systems: [National Commission for the Conservation of Energy [http://www.conae.gob.mx/work/sites/CONAE/resources/LocalContent/4634/5/Leyhorario.pdf] ] *Zone 1 (Central Zone) covers most of Mexico and… …   Wikipedia

  • COMPO-9 — (Offsets Guaranteed by HNS Agreements) (Governmental » Military) …   Abbreviations dictionary

  • Offset agreement — Defense offset agreements are legal trade practices in the aerospace and military industries. These commercial practices do not need state regulations but, since the purchasers are mostly military departments of sovereign nations comparable to… …   Wikipedia

  • Carbon offset — Part of a series on Green economics Concepts …   Wikipedia

  • Carbon neutrality — Carbon neutral redirects here. For other uses, see Carbon neutral (disambiguation). Part of a series on Green economics …   Wikipedia

  • Time zone — Timezone and TimeZone redirect here. For other uses, see Time zone (disambiguation). Local time redirects here. For the mathematical concept, see Local time (mathematics). This article is about time zones in general. For a list of time zones by… …   Wikipedia

  • Heterojunction — A heterojunction is the interface that occurs between two layers or regions of dissimilar crystalline semiconductors. These semiconducting materials have unequal band gaps as opposed to a homojunction. It is often advantageous to engineer the… …   Wikipedia

  • x86 — This article is about Intel microprocessor architecture in general. For the 32 bit generation of this architecture which is also called x86 , see IA 32. x86 Designer Intel, AMD Bits 16 bit, 32 bit, and/or 64 bit Introduced 1978 Design …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”