Day 6

On Day 6, we did mainly analyzing of the inheritance patterns of fruit flies, given the F1 generation (first generation of offspring) and the F2 generation (second generation of offspring). Due to the lack of flies, we used paper flies (flies printed on paper) instead.

What did we have to do? Mainly it was just seperating the paper flies into males and females, and red eyed and white eyed flies (for F1 generation) and short wingspan and long wingspan flies (for the F2 generation). After we got the numbers right, we had to use these statistics to predict the genotypes of the parents from the numbers and proportions of the different offspring.

Nothing much, but it can get quite confusing, especially when we had to use W and W+ to represent the red eyed and white eyed flies respectively. and Vg and Vg+ to represent the vestigial wing and normal wing variety of flies respectively. We had to use these symbols to draw four Punnet's Squares that we could use to help us in our analysis.

Some terms that we learnt:
1. autosomal recessive gene
2. autosomal dominant gene
3. sex-linked recessive gene
4. sex-linked dominant gene

What do they mean?
1. occurs on the autosomes and the phenotype it gives will be expressed even in the gene is heterozygous.
2. occurs on the autosomes and only become phenotypicaly apparent when 2 copies of the same gene is present (needs to be homozygous for it to be expressed)
3. occurs on the sex chromosomes and only becomes phenotypically apparent when 2 copies of the gene are present (needs to be homozygous for itto be expressed)
4. occurs on the sex chromosomes and the phenotype it gives will b e expressed even if the gene is heterozygous.