Applied Botany and Practical Skills
What the exam tests
This domain covers plant breeding, crop improvement, tissue culture, horticulture, medicinal plants, herbarium technique, microscopy, chromatography, and basic laboratory measurements.
Core rules and concepts
- Plant breeding methods include selection, hybridization, mutation breeding, and polyploidy breeding.
- Micropropagation uses explants on sterile nutrient medium with auxins and cytokinins to produce clones.
- Callus is an undifferentiated mass; somatic embryos can form from it.
- Autoclave sterilization uses moist heat under pressure; dry heat is used for glassware.
- Herbarium specimens require pressing, drying, mounting, and a label with scientific name, locality, date, and collector.
- Chromatography separates pigments by differential movement between stationary and mobile phases.
- Microscopy requires correct magnification and calibration; magnification is objective lens × eyepiece lens.
Worked example
A student wants to clone a disease-free banana plant. The sequence is: sterilize the explant, inoculate it on sterile MS medium with suitable auxin and cytokinin, induce shoots, transfer shoots to rooting medium, then harden the plantlets before field planting. The reasoning depends on aseptic technique and hormone balance.
Traps that cost marks
Do not sterilize culture media in a hot-air oven; use an autoclave. Do not omit the herbarium label - an unlabelled specimen has little scientific value. In chromatography, do not confuse the stationary phase with the solvent. Magnification is not resolution.