last resort botany question.

[jwtaylor]

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since you have almost all taken a bio 101 and presumably dealt with the general botany that tends to be a part of bio 101's....im studying for a final and the prof sprung a chapter on botany on us at the last minute..so ive gotta decifer this myself.....alternation of generations?....how could that possibly make sense? sporophyte? gametophyte? what the hell is that all about? can anyone make that as simple as possible? and sorry if you dont think this post belongs here but what else am i going to do?

sincerely,
desperately hating plants.

 

[mercaptovizadeh]

since you have almost all taken a bio 101 and presumably dealt with the general botany that tends to be a part of bio 101's....im studying for a final and the prof sprung a chapter on botany on us at the last minute..so ive gotta decifer this myself.....alternation of generations?....how could that possibly make sense? sporophyte? gametophyte? what the hell is that all about? can anyone make that as simple as possible? and sorry if you dont think this post belongs here but what else am i going to do?

sincerely,
desperately hating plants.

I have some vague memory of this in 9th grade bio. But I think it applies to Bryophytes (mosses and such) rather than vascular plants like trees and flowers and such.

If I remember correctly, the sporophyte makes spores, i.e. haploid spores, via MEIOSIS. These are spread about and germinate into a thallus (kind of a fleshy piece of plant tissue). The thallus has archegonia (female organs) and/or antheridia (is this even right? - male sex organs), so it is called the gametophyte, and these tissues produce gametes, by MITOSIS, which can then recombine to form a diploid organism, i.e. the sporophyte.

I think fungi have something kind of similar, but I could be wrong there as well.

Btw, don't hate plants, they're really cool and provide welcome relief from all that animal-oriented bio.

 

[mercaptovizadeh]

This looks like a decent PPT presentation I found on the web, with good photos:

http://www-plb.ucdavis.edu/Courses/f04/BIS1ca/lec22.pdf

 

[UCLAstudent]

Actually, all plants have alternation of generations. The gametophyte just gets smaller and smaller as plants get more complex (i.e. a fern's gametophyte will be larger than a gymnosperm's).

This thread brings up fond memories of plant physiology last summer.

I have some vague memory of this in 9th grade bio. But I think it applies to Bryophytes (mosses and such) rather than vascular plants like trees and flowers and such.

If I remember correctly, the sporophyte makes spores, i.e. haploid spores, via MEIOSIS. These are spread about and germinate into a thallus (kind of a fleshy piece of plant tissue). The thallus has archegonia (female organs) and/or antheridia (is this even right? - male sex organs), so it is called the gametophyte, and these tissues produce gametes, by MITOSIS, which can then recombine to form a diploid organism, i.e. the sporophyte.

I think fungi have something kind of similar, but I could be wrong there as well.

Btw, don't hate plants, they're really cool and provide welcome relief from all that animal-oriented bio.

 

[jwtaylor]

thank you guys very much, that explanation was dead on actually, i dunno why it cant be worded like that in a text book! and that ppt was extremely helpful, thank you guys!

 

[mercaptovizadeh]

Actually, all plants have alternation of generations. The gametophyte just gets smaller and smaller as plants get more complex (i.e. a fern's gametophyte will be larger than a gymnosperm's).

This thread brings up fond memories of plant physiology last summer.

Thanks, this kind of makes sense. So I'm guessing the gametophyte is tiny enough (in the flower) that we don't even notice it really, whereas the liverwort is pretty explicit.

jwtaylor: no problem, I'm glad it helped.

 

[flash]

botany stinks. back to the biochem of photosynthesis and the calvin cycle. We have to follow radiolabeled carbons around? C'mon, man.