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kharmon's picture

Mendel Revisted

From the observations that we made as a class, we concluded that "expected" results will only be yielded when the breeding is true, when the trait is crossed with the wildtype and all the offspring are wildtype (in F1), and when it doesn't matter if the male or the female possesses the trait. The trait that we chose to observe was curly wing shape, and it was an anomaly and did not adhere to Mendel's rules. When we crossed a curly winged female with a wildtype male, we got a 2:2 ratio of curly to wildtype instead of the expected population of all wildtypes. We then crossed a curly winged male to a wildtype female, to ensure that the possession didn't matter, and we found a similar 2:2 ratio. We concluded from this that our starting point must not have been homozygous and we began testing punnett squares to determine our starting genotypes. After 2 tries, we decided that curly wings are a dominant trait and wildtype is recessive. So in our initial cross, we the wildtype male had a ww genotype and the curly winged female had a heterozygous Cw genotype. The results produce 2 Cw to 2 ww offspring which phenotypically is 2 curly to 2 wild just like our results. To prove this, we crossed two curly winged flies and found a 2:! ratio of curly to wild. The punnett square that we determined from these results was Cw x Cw which yielded CC, Cw, Cw, and ww. As the ratio was 2:1 instead of the expected 3:1, we speculate that the CC genotype is lethal and that all curly winged flies then have a Cw genotype like in our two previous punnetts. Given more time, we would have liked to test several other traits to find out which other traits didn't follow Mendel's rules and why.

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