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During our experiments today, we looked at different crosses of fruit flies and how those crosses compare to the typical results expected in Mendelian genetics. We looked at several different traits: curly wings as opposed to regular wild wings and starry eyes instead of regular eyes. One interesting factor we had to account for was that the original specimens used in the parent generation for both of these traits by the fly lab were heterozygous instead of homozygous for the trait. This was slightly confusing, as it gave us a 3:1 ration for both the F1 and the F2 generation. We came to this conclusion by looking at possible punnett squares for these crosses.

Aside from traditional Mendelian genetics, traits can be influenced in real life by several different genes, or even be expressed in divergent ways, such as co-dominance or incomplete dominance. We're unsure of whether this could be mirrored in the fly lab, but when we tried to look at star eyes in conjuction with purple eyes (a true-breeding trait), our F2 generation produced ver non-mendelian results. Our ratios were not the expected 9:3:3:1, but we couldn't find an obvious exploration. In the future, we would possibly like to explore if this could have been an example of a sex-linked trait as opposed to a gene following the law of independant assortment.

 -stu and drich.