Question

Plants are more readily manipulated by genetic engineering than animals because

• A. recombinant genes can be inserted into plant cells by microinjection
  
• B. a somatic plant cell can grow into a complete plant
  
• C. more vectors are available for transferring recombinant DNA into plant cells
• D. plant genes do not contain introns
  

Answer 1

The correct option is B a somatic plant cell can grow into a complete plant


A somatic cell, is any cell in the body of a multicellular organism, other than a germ cell, gamete, gametocyte. A somatic cell contributes to forming the body of an organism.

The ability of the somatic plant cell to give rise to a complete plant is called totipotency.

Cells in animals show totipotency only during the earlier stages of embryonic development. Thus plants are more readily manipulated by genetic engineering than animals.

Microinjections can be used to directly transfer genes in both plant and animal cells.

The number of cloning vectors present for transferring rDNA into plant and animal cells do not vary much.

Plant cells are eukaryotic in nature. All eukaryotic cells have coding (exons) non-coding (introns) regions in their DNA. During the formation of a functional mRNA, the introns are spliced off so that they do not interfere with the process of protein formation by translation of the mRNA.