A Matter of Selection By Benjamin Buran

            In the past few weeks, the entirety of our classes plants have grown substantially. Nonetheless, as our plants continue to grow, there are many variations in their appearances. The characteristic of the brassica oleracea plant that seems to have displayed the most change is the color and shape of their leaves. As you can clearly see in some of our pictures, some of the plants have the cliched leave colors and shapes. This is the classical green with white stem and a very rounded almost circular leave shape. These common aspects however vary as we look at other plants. In the second picture, you can clearly see that the color of the leaf is darker than our first picture. Also, it has a purple stem and a very jagged leaf outline with the all in all shape of a round triangle. Not only does the shape and color of a plant change over time, but so does the actual size as well. The length of the leaves in the first and second picture are in order, being about three to four inches and five to six inches. Furthermore, the width of these leaves are in fact quite small being only about one to two inches wide. In comparison, the third picture shows leaves that are much bigger than the ones in pictures one  and two. They have a median of about eight inches long and four inches wide. Besides these picture, there are multiple different leaf colors, shapes, and sizes. The aspect that showed the largest area in abnormality was by far the height and diameter of the main stems of the plants. Sadly, the group does not have pictures of the measurements taken, but we did measure our type of plant, the brussels sprout plant. The preliminary brussels sprout that we measured had a height of 8.5 inches and had a diameter of about 2 inches. Plus, the plant showed lots of variation in the lengths of it's leaves and had multiple brussels sprouts growing already. Next, we measured another plant and got a height of fourteen inches and a diameter of only one inch. This plant was different in the way that it had a lot of leaf variation and had only small brussels sprouts growing on the side showing how it is a bit younger  or a slow grower compared to the first one. These results were only for one type of plant in the class garden and actually were still different in height but had a little change in diameter. Now conceptualize the difference there would be if we measured other types of plants in our garden. The group is certain that the height of our plants showed the greatest diversity.

The classes garden has a lot of variability because of an important thing called traits. These "traits" are the results of genes, a unit of heredity that is transferred from a parent to offspring and is held to determine some characteristic of the offspring. These certain genes, that create the genotype, also code for the phenotype, or the physical appearance of an organism. These phenotypes are the variations in the image of the plants in the  garden. Now, brassica oleracea, the plants we're growing in our school garden. In it's entirety, brassica oleracea are a plant species. In biology, when a species of an organism has different genotypes and phenotypes, that can often be describes with the terms of natural variation.  This scientific term, natural variation, links to another few terms, artificial selection and selective breeding. Brassica oleracea involves different plants like cabbage, brussels sprouts, and various other veggies. So in the culinary world, people growing who are growing these plants really want the most out of their seasons harvest. So most often farmers find the best traits for a certain plant and then modify the plant so that they have the correct trait. This is exactly the terms that I stated earlier in my paragraphs, artificial selection and selective breeding.  This belief that producing food with genetically modified organisms (GMO) is very controversial in the food world right now because of the problems it is having and how unhealthy it is. The final topic that I wanted to talk about in terms of variation is mutations. Most often plants get the genes of their parents, which is descent with modification. Yet, sometimes there is a goof up when the DNA is being cloned which results in a mutation.  This leads to an organism with a special trait, such as a turkey with one eye or having a bizarre amount of legs.  Some mutations can be harmful, but not all of them are. 

          After talking about our variation in the garden, I would like to speak about something that changed not as much as the other traits.  The trait that i'm talking about is the structure of veins in the leaves of our plant.  If you look at the pictures above and the pictures below, you will notice that everything that has to do with the anatomy of the plant changed except for this. The common structure of the veins includes a pattern of a main vein down the center of the leaf with much smaller veins veering off to the side, comparable to us humans.  What I found  also similar to humans is the veins purpose to the leaves.  The purpose of the veins is to carry minerals and lots of water to different parts of the plants, like how humans have veins to carry blood to and from parts of the body.  Below are much more pictures that show the similarities in the structure of the leaves veins. 

        In conclusion, I am going to be explaining how plant breeders can change the look in the structure of the veins in the leaves to have a much larger variety in appearances.  The simplest and most elementary solution for them to do would be to use artificial selection.  Artificial selection today is used most commonly to enlarge the size of foods for american consumers. These plants are GMO's, or genetically modified organisms and are argued to cause awful diseases, like cancer.  For what these plant breeders want in this scenario is that there wouldn't be any of that included or mainly talked about to avoid getting in trouble. Instead, these plant breeders would look at the genes for each vein of the plant and try to change that certain one.  Most often, plants inherit their genes from their parents, but with this, the plant breeder would just change the genes to what they would want. Therefore the veins will change when the plant grows.  All in all if this were to actually happen, in about ten years you would most likely see the different structure of each vein in the leaves.