Apomixis

Apomictically produced offspring are genetically identical to the parent plant, except in nonrecurrent apomixis.

Normal asexual reproduction of plants, such as propagation from cuttings or leaves, has never been considered to be apomixis.

In flowering plants, the term "apomixis" is used in a restricted sense to mean agamospermy, i.e. clonal reproduction through seeds.

Some authors included all forms of asexual reproduction within apomixis, but that generalization of the term has since died out.

In some plant families, genera with apomixis are quite common, for example in Asteraceae, Poaceae, and Rosaceae.

Examples of apomixis can be found in the genera Crataegus (hawthorns), Amelanchier (shadbush), Sorbus (rowans and whitebeams), Rubus (brambles or blackberries), Poa (meadow grasses), Nardus stricta (matgrass), Hieracium (hawkweeds) and Taraxacum (dandelions).

[6][7] See also androgenesis and androclinesis described below, a type of male apomixis that occurs in a conifer, Cupressus dupreziana.

[9] Some older text books[10] on the basis of misinformation (that the egg cell in a meiotically unreduced gametophyte can never be fertilized) attempted to reform the terminology to match the term parthenogenesis as it is used in zoology, and this continues to cause much confusion.

Diplospory is further subdivided according to how the megagametophyte forms: Apomixis occurs in at least 33 families of flowering plants, and has evolved multiple times from sexual relatives.