One of a Kind: The Wonders of Biodiversity

My group's plant is Kolrabi, which is a plant in the broccoli family that has broad leaves, purple stems, and a large purple bulb in the center. I can tell that the parent plants probably had large leaves and were larger plants.You could probably predict what the offspring will look like based on the parents; it will inherit many of the same traits. The plants aquire traits from the process of meiosis, which mixes chromosomes of each parent cell and passes it down to the off spring. This will happen again and again, from generation to generation. However, none of the offspring will look exactly like its parent or any of its relatives because it is a combonation of both, not an exact replication of one parent. Some plants in the same family can look very different becuase of mutations and adaptations. The original Brassica Oleracea has passed down many traits to its offspring, which eventually spread to create many types of plants related to it.