Anyone who has rooted a geranium cutting in a jar of water has produced a clone. Gates, who earned a bachelor's degree in biology with an emphasis in genetics and developmental biology from Penn State's Eberly College of Science, knew of apomixis only as a footnote until she started her graduate work in agronomy. Working in Dr. Huff's lab is a great opportunity to learn about this unusual mechanism of plant reproduction as well as study an entirely different genus of plants. Some people tend to think grass is grass. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Pollen does get to fertilize the polar nuclei, which in turn provide food for the embryo.
An apomictically fertilized egg contains all the chromosomes of the mother plant, but half the chromosomes of a sexually fertilized egg are from the mother plant and half from the father. Gates is cross breeding six different cultivars of the grass in every possible combination, totaling 36 different crosses. We can identify them visually because the apomictic offspring look exactly like the mother plant. But to be certain, I'm also identifying genetic markers in the mother plants so that I can examine the offspring at the molecular level. Those carrying the genetic marker are apomictic, and those not carrying it are sexually produced.