Lab Report On Fruit Fly
Introduction
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian friar born in the early 19th century, is known as the founder of modern genetics. Through his work on the pea plant (Pisum sativum), Mendel unearthed the fundamental laws of inheritance. Mendel hypothesized that phenotypic characteristics are determined by hereditary “factors”, which are now known as genes and each gene possesses two alternative forms, known as alleles. From these observations, he developed the Law of Segregation, Law of Independent Assortment, as well as the principle of dominance. In the early 20th century, Thomas Hunt Morgan, an American biologist, began experimenting on Drosophila melanogaster, a common fruit fly. Through his work on D. melanogaster, Morgan elucidated the chromosome …show more content…
The wild-type D. melanogaster possesses large and round wings, red eyes, and a grey body color. Mutant organisms may display differences in wings (apterous, miniature, vestigial), eye color (sepia, white), or body color (ebony) (McGill University, 2017).
The objective of this experiment is to cross mutant fruit flies and examine three traits (wing shape, eye color and body color) of the F2 generation to determine their mode of inheritance; whether they are sex-linked or autosomal, and recessive or dominant, utilizing the Chi-square statistical test, which compares observed and predicted results, and to ultimately determine the genotype and phenotype of the parents.
In this experiment, given the nature of a dihybrid cross, the following hypothesis was formulated. According to Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance, the F2 generation of a dihybrid cross involving two traits of a homozygous recessive mutant and a homozygous wild-type is expected to yield a phenotypic ratio of 9:3:3:1. To evaluate whether the experiment follows the Mendel Laws, the null hypothesis (H0), a method of statistical analysis, states that the observed ratio of the phenotypes does not differ significantly from the expected ratio if the p-value is superior to 0.05 (Pierce,
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian friar born in the early 19th century, is known as the founder of modern genetics. Through his work on the pea plant (Pisum sativum), Mendel unearthed the fundamental laws of inheritance. Mendel hypothesized that phenotypic characteristics are determined by hereditary “factors”, which are now known as genes and each gene possesses two alternative forms, known as alleles. From these observations, he developed the Law of Segregation, Law of Independent Assortment, as well as the principle of dominance. In the early 20th century, Thomas Hunt Morgan, an American biologist, began experimenting on Drosophila melanogaster, a common fruit fly. Through his work on D. melanogaster, Morgan elucidated the chromosome …show more content…
The wild-type D. melanogaster possesses large and round wings, red eyes, and a grey body color. Mutant organisms may display differences in wings (apterous, miniature, vestigial), eye color (sepia, white), or body color (ebony) (McGill University, 2017).
The objective of this experiment is to cross mutant fruit flies and examine three traits (wing shape, eye color and body color) of the F2 generation to determine their mode of inheritance; whether they are sex-linked or autosomal, and recessive or dominant, utilizing the Chi-square statistical test, which compares observed and predicted results, and to ultimately determine the genotype and phenotype of the parents.
In this experiment, given the nature of a dihybrid cross, the following hypothesis was formulated. According to Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance, the F2 generation of a dihybrid cross involving two traits of a homozygous recessive mutant and a homozygous wild-type is expected to yield a phenotypic ratio of 9:3:3:1. To evaluate whether the experiment follows the Mendel Laws, the null hypothesis (H0), a method of statistical analysis, states that the observed ratio of the phenotypes does not differ significantly from the expected ratio if the p-value is superior to 0.05 (Pierce,