Biology · Class 11 Science

Ch 8Plant Tissues and Anatomy — Class 11 Biology, concept-first.

Anatomy is the branch of botany that deals with the internal structure of a plant, as opposed to morphology, which deals with external form. Every organ of a plant — root, stem, leaf, flower — is built from groups of cells, and a tissue is defined as a group of cells that share a common origin and work together toward…

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Meristematic Tissue

A meristem (Gk. meristos = divisible; term coined by C. Nageli, 1858) is a tissue whose cells retain the ability to divide repeatedly and indefinitely, and it is one of the two principal categories every plant tissue fal…

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Chapter contents

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Tissue

Anatomy is the branch of botany that deals with the internal structure of a plant, as opposed to morphology, which deals with external form.

Meristematic Tissue

Meristematic tissue is made of young cells that are still actively dividing. Because they are perpetually immature, meristematic cells share a distinctive set of features quite different from any perm…

Classification of Meristem

Meristems can be classified in three different ways, and a single meristem is usually described using all three labels at once — one for its origin, one for its position, and one for its function.

Permanent Tissue

Permanent tissue is made of cells that have finished dividing and, through a series of physiological, morphological and functional changes during maturation, have settled into one fixed size, shape an…

Simple Permanent Tissues

Simple permanent tissues are each made of a single cell type carrying out a single kind of function, and may be either living or dead depending on the type.

Complex Permanent Tissues

Complex permanent tissues are heterogeneous — made of more than one type of cell — but all the component cells function together as a single unit, and their shared job is conducting sap and food from…

Tissue Systems

Independent of what kind of cells they are built from, plant tissues also organise themselves into larger functional systems based purely on their position and structure within the organ.

Epidermal Tissue System

The epidermal tissue system forms the outermost protective covering of the whole plant body and develops from the protoderm.

Ground Tissue System

The ground tissue system is essentially a system defined by exclusion — it is everything in the plant body that is not part of the epidermal system or the vascular system.

Vascular Tissue System

The vascular tissue system is made of the distinct patches of complex tissue — xylem and phloem — running through the plant body, and the different ways these patches can be arranged relative to each…

Secondary Growth in Plants

Primary growth — the vertical lengthening of roots and stems — is driven entirely by apical meristems.

Wood

The activity of the vascular cambium is not uniform through the year — it responds to the seasons, and this seasonal rhythm is recorded permanently in the wood the cambium produces.

Cork Cambium and Secondary Growth

Increase in stem diameter through secondary growth is driven mainly by the vascular cambium, but that growth puts the original outer epidermis under strain, and it eventually ruptures — so it has to b…

Anatomy of Root, Stem and Leaf

Having covered the tissues and tissue systems individually, the chapter now looks at how those systems come together inside a real organ.

Anatomy of Dicot Root

A transverse section of a typical dicotyledonous root, read from the outside inward, shows the following layers.

Anatomy of Monocot Root

The monocot root shares the same basic outer plan as the dicot root — epiblema with root hairs, a parenchymatous cortex, an endodermis with Casparian strips, and a pericycle bounding the stele.

Anatomy of Dicot Stem (Sunflower)

A transverse section of a typical dicot stem, illustrated using sunflower, shows the following organisation from outside in.

Anatomy of Monocot Stem

The monocot stem differs from the dicot stem in several clear ways. The epidermis lacks trichomes altogether, and immediately beneath it the hypodermis is sclerenchymatous rather than collenchymatous,…

Anatomy of Leaf — Dorsiventral (Dicot) Leaf

The most common leaf type in dicotyledonous plants is the dorsiventral leaf, in which the mesophyll — the internal photosynthetic tissue — is clearly differentiated into two distinct layers, palisade…

Isobilateral (Monocot) Leaf

Where a leaf's two surfaces are illuminated more or less equally — because the leaf hangs vertically, or is oriented edge-on to the sun, as is common in grasses and many other monocots — the leaf deve…

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