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The upcoming discussion will update you about the difference between shoot apical meristem and floral meristem.
Difference # Shoot Apical Meristem:
1. It forms vegetative organs of a plant.
2. It has indefinite growth.
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3. It promotes longitudinal growth of the axis.
4. It has unlimited life. It produces vegetative organs continuously.
5. It is not compressed. The vegetative organs like leaves are widely spaced up on the stem.
6. The growth of shoot meristem is not dependent on the duration of light.
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7. The apex of plumule is the shoot meristem.
8. It consists of outer tunica and inner corpus layers.
9. It does not exhibit much size fluctuations during development.
10. The mitotic activity remains more or less constant.
11. The tunica cells contain little RNA.
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12. The corpus cells have small nucleolar volume.
13. The cytoplasmic RNA content is usually restricted to the flanks of vegetative shoot apices.
Difference # Floral Meristem:
1. It forms reproductive organs of a plant.
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2. It has definite growth.
3. It forms a large surface area of meristematic tissue where floral primordia develop.
4. It has limited life. It produces inflorescence and floral primordia and then dies.
5. It is very compressed and tends to be flat so that all floral parts appear to be borne approximately at the same level.
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6. The growth of floral meristem is dependent on definite critical photoperiod.
7. Shoot meristem is transformed to floral meristem.
8. It consists of outer meristematic mantle and inner parenchymatous core which are respectively equivalent to tunica and corpus.
9. It exhibits much size fluctuations during development. The apex may be conical, elongated and flattened etc.
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10. It exhibits increased mitotic activity as is revealed by mitotic index.
11. The central axial cells have more RNA.
12. The tunica cells that form the surface layer of outer meristematic mantle have increased nucleolar volume.
13. It contains more RNA than shoot meristem and the RNA uniformly spreads through out, the apices.
