What is Totipotency?

A cell which has an ability to divide and differentiates to develop the whole plant is called as totipotency and such cell is called as totipotent cell.

Define Totipotency

• The term totipotent has two different definitions in the medical lexicon run by the National Institutes of Health: "capable of growing into a complete organism" and "differentiating into any of its tissues or cells."
• The crucial distinctions between these two definitions are at the heart of most of the misunderstanding surrounding the term totipotency. Although a one-cell embryo is "totipotent" in both definitions, some authors exclusively use the second term to refer to malignancies and stem cells.
• The discrepancies among these two definitions are not slight. To create a mature organism, it is necessary to be able to both manufacture every cell in the body and arrange them in a specific temporal and spatial sequence, or to go through a coordinated development process.
• In this view, totipotency is shown by the ability of an isolated cell to mature into an adult who is fertile. A totipotent cell can therefore form a developmentally coordinated sequence at the global level and is a one-cell embryo.