What do plants reproduce

We can eat plants directly, like fruits and vegetables. We need plants for our other foods too, like the grass that cows eat to give us milk, cheese, and yogurt. By learning about the plants that we need for food, scientists can figure out how we can grow more of these plants, how to grow them more efficiently, and how to use less of valuable resources such as land and water, in the cultivation of these foods.

Other than food, can you think of more ways that we use plants? Self-fertilizing plants, known as selfers , make pollen that can fertilize their own ovules Figure 1A.

If a flower has both female and male parts, it is called hermaphroditic. Sometimes there are separate female and male flowers, but they are on the same plant. Monoecious plants are examples of selfers because they do not need two separate plants in order to reproduce. How many of the selfers pictured in Figure 2 do you know?

Cross-fertilizing plants, known as outcrossers , need two separate plants in order to reproduce. Sometimes, a flower can have both pollen and ovules, but they cannot fertilize each other; this is called self-incompatibility.

For outcrossers to successfully reproduce, the pollen and ovules need to be from separate plants. In other cases, the two sexes are completely separate, with some plants making only male flowers and other plants making only female flowers. This is similar to how reproduction works in most animals.

The pollen from the male plants needs to travel to the ovules of the female plant in order to produce seeds. How many of the outcrossers pictured in Figure 2 do you know? There are still a lot of mysteries about how and why some types of outcrossers are dioecious.

Scientists decided to look at the DNA from many different kinds of dioecious plants to try to understand what makes them male or female. There is a lot you can learn from DNA that may not be so obvious from just looking at or growing a plant. A DNA sequence is a lot like letters on a keyboard: the letters by themselves do not mean anything, but when they are put together they can form words. Scientists compared the genes from several dioecious plants to figure out which genes were important in determining whether a plant is male or female.

They discovered that there are several ways a plant can determine gender. For example, there can be genes in the DNA that make plants male or genes that prevent them from becoming female [ 1 ]. Looking at plant DNA is not the only way scientists can learn about the differences between male and female plants. For example, they can study the shape differences between male flowers and female flowers. You can do this too! In artificial budding, a bud from one plant is grafted on other plants that result in the growth of new plants from these buds.

Vegetative propagation is the process in which the plant gives rise to a new plant structure, either naturally or manually. A fragment of the parent plant or a specialized reproductive structure in the parent body gives rise to offspring in this type of reproduction. Apomixis is the replacement of sexual reproduction by the asexual mode of reproduction in plants.

In this process, seeds are formed and the embryo also develops but without the fusion of male and female gametes with each other. One example of apomixis is the production of egg cells by mitosis. This then develops into an embryo without fertilization. It is the process in which the parent body divides into fragments to give rise to new individuals.

The process of fragmentation can partly turn into asexual reproduction if some of the fragments formed further reproduce by sexual reproduction. Angiosperms mostly reproduce by the mode of sexual reproduction. A flower is a reproductive organ in angiosperms.

A flower may male or female or both the reproductive organs. Flowers carry out the process of sexual reproduction in plants by bringing about the fusion of male and female gametes to produce the seeds which bear the fruit. The seeds germinate and develop into new individual plants. Thus, in the sexual mode of reproduction, new plants are produced through the fusion of female and male gametes which produces an embryo.

Seed plants have special structures on them where male and female cells join together through a process called fertilisation. After fertilisation, a tiny plant called an embryo is formed inside a seed.

The seed protects the embryo and stores food for it. The parent plant disperses or releases the seed. If the seed lands where the conditions are right, the embryo germinates and grows into a new plant. Scientists divide seed plants into two main groups: plants with flowers and plants with cones.

They also have special names for these groups. Plants that have flowers are called angiosperms. Plants that hold their seeds in cones are called gymnosperms. Angiosperms have flowers. The flowers are special structures for reproduction. They contain male parts that make pollen and female parts that contain ovules. Some plants have these male and female parts in different flowers. Pollen is carried from a male part to a female part by wind, insects or other animals a process called pollination , where it releases male gametes that fertilise the female gametes in the ovules.

The ovules develop into seeds from which new plants will grow. In most angiosperms, part of the flower develops into fruit, which protects the seeds inside them.