Do plants have DNA?

Moment of Um

American Public Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

DNA is the secret recipe that makes you…YOU! The color of your hair…whether you like cilantro…so many traits have something to do with this microscopic, spiralized instruction manual in your cells. But what about plants? Do they have DNA, too? We asked biologist Candace Haigler to help us find the answer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.
0:06.8	Moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Astrid.
0:15.0	Um.
0:16.6	Okay, all right, everybody. That's it for today's plant yoga class.
0:23.9	Thank you everybody for coming. Okay, bye right, everybody. That's it for today's plant yoga class. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Okay, bye, bye.
0:33.5	Okay. Hi there. I'm Astrid. I'm a Daisy, and I just got done teaching yoga to all the other plants in the garden.
0:43.2	Oh, um, excuse me. Trees. Uh, you can get out of tree pose now. Yeah, class is over. Okay, thank you,
0:49.5	thank you, thank you. Bye. Sorry about that. Anyway, this year, I feel like I've been on this journey of like finding myself, you know? Sometimes when I want to be super chill, I like to get
0:57.0	real quiet. I close my eyes. I take a deep breath and I try to clear my mind of all the thoughts.
1:06.2	And for like 10 seconds, everything is quiet.
1:11.4	Hmm.
1:18.0	But one by one, all these little questions start creep back in my head.
1:20.4	Like, what's that tickle?
1:22.9	Is that a bug on my stem?
1:25.3	Or am I just imagining it?
1:31.6	Do bugs ever crawl on other bugs? Why do bugs have to be so buggy?
1:39.1	And why am I the way I am? Why are my petals so white? Why am I short instead of a hundred feet tall like a great big tree? I was asking my friend Sandy about all this. She's a dog. And she said if I really
1:47.7	want to understand why I am the way I am, I should get a DNA test. And I was like, what's that?
1:54.2	And she told me that DNA is this teeny tiny, spirally stuff inside of cells that acts like an
2:00.2	instruction manual for your body?
2:03.2	She said that bodies read the DNA kind of like a book to figure out how it's supposed to grow and what it's supposed to be doing.
2:12.2	And those instructions are what makes you you.
	...

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