system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If a plant grows from a cutting from another one, are they genetically identical?
gpt
Yes they are. Farmers take advantage of this for crops that are extremely heterozygous, like apples. If you plant apple seeds you are almost guaranteed to end up with an apple that tastes terrible. You can still make hard cider from them, but they aren't good for much else. Over generations of seedlings, farmers have found a few cultivars that produce tasty apples, and these are kept going through cloning (i.e. grafting) rather than planting seeds so we don't lose that specific combination of genes.

A drawback of this approach is that the cloned crop is more vulnerable to disease or pests - anything that can attack one tree is equally good at attacking all the others. This is a big problem for bananas in particular. Up until the 1950's, the Gros Michel cultivar was overwhelmingly planted. Panama disease wiped out the crop world wide, forcing farmers to find a new cultivar. Now almost all bananas are part of the Cavendish group of cultivars, with a distinctly different taste from the older bananas. There is a risk that disease will wipe out the Cavendish some day, and we currently don't have a "backup" cultivar that can replace it.