Advantages Of A Dominant Sporophyte

Rebecca Dwyer

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“The Advantages of a Dominant Sporophyte over a Dominant Gametophyte”

It is commonly known by most people that the planet that humans call home is inhabited by many other diverse forms of life. Further than this, it is evident that a large percentage of these life forms are plants. This could be seen as a slight paradox- plants can be considered more primitive than animals, because they are incapable of movement in order to escape from predation, or to reach close contact distance with other organisms for the purpose of reproduction. How then, one could ask, has the survival of the plant kingdom been so successful?

The answer- plants have developed many important behavioural and physiological methods not shared

Eukaryotes with haploid/gametophyte generation dominated life cycles for quite some time before the appearance of plants with a sporophyte/diploid dominant generation. Most eukaryotic plants today are sporophyte dominant, the gametophyte domination existing in fewer, simpler algal plant forms (Yin-Long QUI et al., 2012). This could indicate that the sporophyte dominant plants have an evolutionary advantage, at least in certain environments, over the gametophyte dominant plants

The purpose of a gametophyte is essentially one of mass reproduction- it is intended to produce many gametes in order to increase chances of fertilisation (Ingrouille and Eddie, 2006.) This gives it the ability to repopulate new areas much faster than the sporophyte alone. Whilst it is very successful at this, and is in most cases necessary to the plant, the very mechanism by which it reproduces (mitosis) does not result in much genetic variation. Should an environmental change come along for which the species is not adapted, it is likely that it will be wiped out entirely. This is because none of the individuals have developed any mutations or genetic adaptations that allow them to survive in that