Cuttings

• A piece of stem with several leaves, part of a root, or a leaf is cut from a parent plant. The piece of plant is placed in a growing medium and sometimes a rooting hormone is used to hasten root growth. New roots form and a new plant grows. The new plant is genetically identical to the parent plant and is a clone. Cuttings produce a wide variety of new plants including aloe, begonia and African violets.
  
  

Tissue Culture

• A very small piece of a plant leaf or other structure is placed in culture medium in a sterile test tube or Petri dish. The culture medium containing sugars, nutrients, hormones and vitamins encourages the plant piece to develop into plantlets. The plantlets are later transplanted into pots with potting soil. Hundreds of identical or cloned plants are developed from a small amount of plant material. Strawberry plants, African violets and Douglas fir trees are examples of plants propagated by tissue culture or micropropagation.
  
  

Grafting

• With grafting, a stem or bud is removed from a parent plant. The stem or bud is attached to the stem or root of another plant. With this method, rose plants that produce desirable blossoms but poor root systems are attached to plants with sturdy roots. Seedless naval oranges and seedless grapes are examples of plants propagated by grafting. The top part of the plants may be clones and the plants producing the roots may also be clones.
  
  

Other Types of Cloning

• When a potato is cut into pieces, each containing an "eye," and planted, potatoes are cloned. Strawberry plants send out runners or stolons. The runners come into contact with the soil and begin to grow roots. The newly developed plants are clones of the parent plant. Rhizomes are underground stems found on iris plants. When the rhizomes are cut into pieces, each part grows a new plant that is genetically identical to the parent plant. Daffodils grow from bulbs. New bulbs form beside the originally planted bulb and each new bulb is genetically identical to the original bulb. The bulbs are separated from the clump and grow into new identical plants.