Mendelian genetics Flashcards
Who was Gregory Mendel?
An Austrian Monk who conducted experiments on pea plants to investigate inheritance and proposed three principles:
1) Law of independent assortment
2) Law of dominance
3) Law of segregation
He demonstrated that characters are transmitted as particles of information between generation (genes)
What is blending inheritance?
Offspring are a dilution of different parental characteristics
Why were pea plants ideal to investigate?
He had strict control over which plants mated (self-fertilization is an option) and the environment
Each pea plan has both male (stamens) and female (pistill) reproductive organs
Mendel’s experiments
1) He grew true breeding purple and white plants (produce offspring with the same traits when self-fertilized) to create a parent generation
2) He created a set of monohybrid crosses (purple X white) to find the F1 generation and discovered all offspring had purple flowers (dominant trait)
3) F1 generation was self-fertilized and white flowers reappeared in the F2 generation in a ratio of 705 purple to 224 white (3:1)
What did Mendel conclude?
An organism inherits 2 factors (allele) for a characteristic and when the plant reproduces these two characters separate = law of segregation
Each gamete gives one allele to each offspring and each offspring gets one allele from each parent
What is the relationship between dominant and recessive traits?
Homozygous dominant = dominant trait is expressed
Heterozygous = dominant trait is expressed (recessive masked)
Homozygous recessive = recessive trait is expressed
What is the phenotype?
The physical description of the trait expressed
What is the genotype?
The genetic makeup of each trait (PP/Pp/pp)
Exploring the 3:1 ratio
One homozygous dominant : two heterozygotes : one homozygous recessive
1:2:1
What are alleles?
Different versions of the same gene with variation in the sequence of nucleotides bases at the specific gene locus
What did Mendel explore in his dihybrid crosses?
Observed that one trait did not affect another trait and identified that different genes segregate independently from one another during gamete formation.
Genes get shuffled and these combinations are one of the advantages of sexual reproduction
EXAMPLE: Mendel’s dihybrid cross
A true breeding yellow round pea plant was crossed with a true breeding green wrinkled pea plant
Observed that yellow is dominant to green and round is dominant to wrinkled
9:3:3:1 9 = yellow/round peas 3 = green/round peas 3 = yellow/wrinkled peas 1 = green/wrinkled peas
What are inherited recessive disorders?
Only show in homozygous recessive individuals, where both copies of the recessive allele must be inherited
Heterozygotes are phenotypically normal but carry the disorder
CYSTIC FIBROSIS
What are inherited dominant disorders?
Only require one dominant allele to be present = no carriers
Achondroplasia
What is the genetic makeup of humans?
46 chromosomes
23 pairs of homologous chromosomes (one maternal and one paternal)
22 pairs of autosomes and 1 pair of sex chromosomes