| Genetics |
| Did it ever occur to you that you look like one of your parents or a relative? Why do you have your mother's green eyes instead of your father's blue eyes? Why is it that you have your uncle's blond hair instead of your mother's amber hair? Why do you look like one person but not the other? In class, we learned about certain traits that belong to certain people and how they received these traits. It is all a part of the genetic world. |
| Genetics is the process in which your traits are formed. Traits are characteristics that you have. Some examples of traits are your eye color, hair color, shape of your eyes, shape of your nose, and more. Genotype and Phenotype are big part of genetics. "Phenotype is the physical appearance of an inherited trait in an individual." In other words, Phenotype are your physical appearance. "genotype is the combination of alleles in an individual". Which means that genotype is the genetic information that make up the phenotype. What are alleles? Alleles are letters that make up your genotype. Two alleles are needed to make a genotype. (the quotes stated is found in: "The Living Environment" By Rick Callman) There are 2 kind of alleles, dominant and recessive. Dominant alleles are strong compared to recessive alleles. Recessive are weak and hidden when the dominant alleles are present. Mendel, a monk that who was also known as the "father of genetics" experimented with pea plants to prove how dominant is stronger than recessive. Domaint alleles are always represented in captial letters and recessive alleles are always represent in lower case letters. During Mendel's experiment, he experienced with pea plant to find out the dominant trait and the recessive trait. When a recessive allele is paired up with a dominant allele, the recessive never shows up. For example, if a pea plant's genotype is "Gg". that means the phenotype will show up green and not yellow. That doesn't mean, the recessive allele is gone. It just mean that it doesn't show up becaue it is weak. In order for recessive to show up, the two alleles have to be recessive. If a pea plant's genotype is "gg" then the pea pod would be yellow because it have two alleles that are recessive, therefore, the recessive shows up. |
| If your parents have two different traits, how do you know which trait you would inherit? A punnet square shows you how much chance your offspring will inherit a certain trait. Our class did a project to experiment with genetics and punnet squares. |
| The project our class did was called "All in the family". This project talks about the probabilities of inheriting traits. This project experiments with 2 pets with their offsprings. From doing this project, we learned why each offspring inherits each trait and the two different alleles. First, we pair up with a partner with pets (a girl and a boy). Then, you decide what traits your pet will have. There are 5 traits- nose, eyes, teeth, color, gender. There are both dominant and recessive forms of each trait. Triangular nose is dominant with a genotype of (T). The recessive form of nose is oval shape with a genotype of (t). Round eyes is dominant with a genotype of (R). Square eyes are recessive with a genotype of (r). Pointed teeth is dominant with a genotype of (P). Squared teeth is recessive with a genotype of (p). Blue skin is dominant with a genotype of (B), Yellow Skin is recessive with a genotype of (b). Now that your pet's genotype and phenotype is identified, you cross the two pets (which creates 6 offsprings). First, you have to make Punnett Squares to show the possibility of inheriting each trait. Then, you and your partner flip 2 coins (heads is dominant allele, tails is recessive allele). You then put the alleles together for each trait to decide which trait belongs to which offspring. Once your 6 offsprings' traits are determined, see how accurate the punnet square is? Is the punnet square accurate? Try to do this project with a partner and answer this question. |
| Before you continue, please view our glossary for certain vocabularies that we think is important for you to understand. |