Sporophyte Sentence Examples

The sporophyte is always highly organized both as regards form and structure.

It is confined to the sporophyte, which forms the, leafy plant in these groups, and is known as the vascular system.

The independent plant which is generally attached to the soil by hair-like structures is the sexual generation, the sporophyte is a stalked or sessile capsule which remains always attached to the gametophyte from which it derives the whole or part of its nourishment.

The sporophyte is the plant which is differentiated into stem, leaf and root, which show a wonderful variety 01 form; the internal structure also shows increased complexity and variety as compared with the other group of vascular plants, the Pteridophyta.

After fertilization the female cell, now called the oospore, divides and part of it develops into the embryo (new sporophyte), which remains dormant for a time still protected by the ovule which has developed to become the seed.

The body of the sporophyte in the great majority of the vascular plants shows a considerable increase in complexity over that found in the gametophyte of Bryophytes.

The structure of the stomata of the sporophyte of vascular plants is fundamentally the same as that of the stomata on the sporogonium of the true mosses and of the liverwort A nihoceros.

Thus in the series Bryophyta, Pteridophyta, Phanerogamia, whilst the sporophyte presents progressive development, the gametophyte presents continuous reduction.

This evolution of the sporophyte is no doubt to be correlated with the great change in the external conditions of life.

There is no conclusive ground for regarding the action of this change as having been direct, it is more reasonable to regard it as indirect, having acted as a general stimulus to which the ever-increasing complexity of the sporophyte was the response.

Concerning the second question, the recent investigations of Buchner ascogenous hyphae with their asci represent the sporophyte since they are derived from the fertilized ascogonium.

The matter is complicated by the apogamous transition from gametophyte to sporophyte in the absence of the ascogonium; also by the fact that there are normally two fusions in the life-history as mentioned earlier.

The last-mentioned case has been regarded as representing an apogamous development of the sporophyte from the gametophyte comparable to the cases of apogamy described in Ferns.

The gametophyte, which bears the sexual organs, is either a free-living thallus corresponding in degree of differentiation with the lower liverworts, or it is a mass of cells which always remains enclosed in a spore and is parasitic upon the sporophyte.

In the vascular cryptogams and phanerogams it takes place in the spore mother cells and the reduced number is found in all the cells of the gametophyte, the full number in those of the sporophyte.

However, they belong respectively to two different forms in the life-history of the plants; the leaves of the mosses are borne by the gametophyte, those of the club-mosses by the sporophyte.

There is thus in all the Basidiales an alternation of generations, obscured, however, by the apogamous transition from the gametophyte to sporophyte.

Although in the forms without aecidia the two generations are not sharply marked off from one another, we may look up the generation with single nuclei in the cells as the gametophyte and that with conjugate nuclei as the sporophyte.

From egg to spore-mother-cell is sporophyte; from spore-mother-cell to egg is gametophyte.

If the sporophyte generation is confined to the cystocarp, is the tetrasporiferous plant, as has been suggested, merely a potential gametophyte reproducing by a process analogous to the budformation of the Bryophyta?

After fertilization the latter surrounds itself with a cell-wall and develops into the sporophyte.

The complete life-history, with its regular alternation of gametophyte and sporophyte, is now known in all except a few rare genera of recent Pteridophyta, and will be described in connexion with the several groups.

B, Prothallus bearing young sporophyte.

In habit and mode of life of the prothallus these present striking differences, which may be correlated with the situations inhabited by the sporophyte, and are perhaps to be regarded as adaptations which have enabled the species to survive.

When new individuals of species which possess a protocorm arise vegetatively from the leaves or roots of young plants, the protocorm appears in the young sporophyte.

Some of the more striking adaptive modifications in the gametophyte and sporophyte, and certain effects of altered external conditions which have been ascertained experimentally, may be briefly mentioned.

On this view the origin of the sporophyte is looked for in the gradual development of sterile tissue in the generation arising from the fertilized ovum, and a consequent postponement of spore-formation.

Although the antithetic theory is supported by many facts regarding the lifehistory and structure of the group of plants under consideration, it is quite possible that a stage in which the sporophyte was wholly dependent on the gametophyte may never have been passed through in their evolution.

Without entering further into the discussion of these alternative theories, for which the literature of the subject must be consulted, it may be pointed out that on the latter view the strobiloid forms of Pteridophyta would not necessarily be regarded as primitive relatively to the large-leaved forms, and also that the early stages of the origin of the sporophyte in the two cases may have proceeded on different lines.

They exhibit alternation of generations; the dominant phase (the kelp plant) is the sporophyte.

The plant producing the spores is called the sporophyte.

Both sexual and asexual reproduction occur, but there is usually no definite succession of the two modes, marking that alternation of sexual generation (gametophyte) and asexual generation (sporophyte) which characterizes the higher groups.

The Archegoniatae are characterized by a well-marked alternation of gametophyte and sporophyte generations; the former bears the sexual organs which are of characteristic structure and known as antheridia (male) and archegonia (female) respectively; the fertilized egg-cell on germination gives rise to the spore-bearing generation, and the spores on germination give rise directly or indirectly to a second gametophyte.

The Ferns and fern-like plants (see PTERIDOP1IYTA) have on the other hand a well developed independent sporophyte which is differentiated into stem, leaf and root with highly organized internal structure including true vascular bundles.

If the axis of such a sporogonium were prolonged downwards into the soil to form a fixing and absorptive root, the whole structure would become a physiologically independent plant, exhibiting in many though by no means all respects the leading features of the sporophyte or ordinary vegetative and spore-bearing individual in Ptericlophytes and Phanerogams. These facts, among others, have led to the theory, plausible in some respects, of the origin of this sporophyte by descent from an Anthoceros-like sporogonium (see PTERIDOPHYTA).

Within the limits of the sporophyte generation the Pteridophytes and Phanerogams also differ from the Bryophytes in possessing special assimilative and transpiring organs, the leaves, though these organs are developed, as we have seen, in the gametophyte of many liverworts and of all the mosses.

In accordance with the prevalent antithetic view of the alternation of generations in these plants (see PLANTS, REPRODUCTION or), the forms distinguished as sporophyte and gametophyte are not homogenetic; consequently their leaves are not homologous, but are only functionally similar (homoplastic; see infra).

All but the lowest plants visibly tend towards or actually achieve in various degrees the differentiation of the body, whether sporophyte or gametophyte, into stem, leaf, root, &c., that is, the differentiation of parts not previously present.

With the transition from water to land came the progressive development of the sporophyte which is the characteristic feature of the morphology of the Bryophyta and of all plants above them in the scale of life (see Bower, Origin of a Land-Flora).

In a fern-plant, for example, which is a sporophyte, every karyokinesis divulges the double number, while in the prothallium, which is the gametophyte generation, the single number appears.

As the result of fertilization of an ovum produced by this, the fern plant (sporophyte, asexual generation) originates; from it spores are ultimately set free,.

In the former the prothallus produces one or more fern-plants vegetatively, the projection which develops into the sporophyte in many cases occupying the position of an archegonium.

In Britain there are no more than two dozen individual sporophyte plants, living in about a dozen places.

When the young sporophyte first begins its independent lifewhen, that is, it exists in the form of the embryo in the seedits living substance has no power of utilizing the simple inorganic compounds spoken of.

The sporophyte may be considered to begin at the stage of nuclear association and end with the nuclear reduction in the basidium.

As is well known, the dividing nuclei of the cells of the sporophyte generation of the higher plants exhibit a double number of chromosomes, while the dividing nuclei of the cells of the gametophyte generation exhibit the single number.

Upon the evidence it would seem therefore that so far as Nemalion is concerned an alternation occurs comparable with that existing in the lower Bryophyta where the sporophyte is relatively small, being attached to and to some extent parasitic upon the gametophyte.

It has been held by some, however, that the first brood corresponds to the sporophyte generation of the higher plants, and that the rest of the cycle is the gametophyte generation.

Blackman, who also succeeded in showing that the nuclei of the sporophyte generation contain twice as many chromosomes as the nuclei of the gametophyte.

The point common to all Pteridophyta is that from the first the gametophyte is an independent organism, while the sporophyte, though in the first stages of its development it obtains nutriment from the prothallus, becomes physiologically independent when its root develops.

The early segmentation of the embryo differs in the several groups, but usually the first leaf or leaves, the apex of the stem and the first root are differentiated early, while a special absorbent organ (the foot) maintains for some time the physiological connexion between the sporophyte and the prothallus.

In some apogamous Ferns sporangia may occur on the prothallus and the vegetative organs of the sporophyte may also occur singly.

The main existing groups of the Filicaceae may now be briefly described, with special reference to the characters of gametophyte and sporophyte, which have been found of value in determining affinities.

The series which can be constructed from a study of the sorus is in general supported by the anatomy of the sporophyte, and by the structure and sexual organs of the gametophyte.

This surface layer in the typically subaerial shoot of the sporophyte in Pteridophytes and Phanerogams is known as the epidermis, though the name is restricted by some writers, on account of developmental differences, to the surface layer of the shoot of Angiosperms, and by others extended to the surface layer of the whole plant in both these groups.