Variation and Diversity Flashcards
What is a Taxon?
A group of named organisms
What is Phylogeny?
their evolutionary history
What is the Hierarchy of taxonomic groups?
Domain
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
What is courting behaviour?
how organisms of the same species find mates (flirting basically)
How does courting behaviour help individuals?
- helps recognise members of their own species and those of the opposite sex
- identify a mate that is capable of breeding
- synchronise mating
- form a pair bond
How is generic diversity in a species investigated?
- frequency of measurable or observable characteristics
- amino acid sequence of proteins coded by DNA/mRNA
- based sequence of DNA and mRNA
what is INTERspecific variation?
variation between organisms of different species
What is INTRAspecific variation?
variation between organisms of the same species
(they will have same genes but not all alleles will be the same)
How is random sampling carried out?
- divide study area into numbered grid
- pick random coordinates and take a sample from there
Why should a large sample size be used?
reduces the effect of chance on the sampling process and it will be more representative
What is standard deviation?
how far data spreads across the mean
What is the relationship between standard deviation and variation?
as the value of standard deviation increases so does the degree of variation
How are classification systems found?
by comparing the proteins, DNA and RNA of different species
this produces more accurate systems
How does comparing DNA provide more information than comparing amino acid’s sequences?
- the degeneracy of the genetic code, the same amino acid may be coded by different base triplets
- Eukaryotic DNA contains introns which can me compared
Why is comparing mRNA base sequences better than DNA?
- the more closely related a species the more mRNA base sequences they have in common(like DNA)
- it’s easier to isolate the mRNA from cells than DNA
