Common Fruit Fly Lab Report

The common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is one of the most used organisms in the field of genetics to study heredity. They are a great to use in experiments because they are inexpensive, easily obtainable and have very short life cycles. The purpose of this experiment was to test whether or not certain traits were autosomal or X-linked. We hypothesized that certain traits of the fruit fly would be autosomal and follow Medellin genetics and that the genes would be unlinked. The traits that were examined were eye color, wing type and body type. We did this by crossing true breeding wild type female flies with true breeding mutant male flies. Then we allowed the F1s to sib-mate to yield F2s. Then, we examined and recorded the phenotypes