Genetics Archive
The first-ever analysis of single-gene inheritance as a pathway to gene discovery was carried out by Gregor Mendel. His is the analysis that we shall follow as an example. Mendel chose the garden pea, Pisum sativum, as his research organism.The choice of …
Observed and Expected Ratios: When two individuals of known genotype are crossed, we expect certain ratios of genotypes and phenotypes in the progeny; these expected ratios are based on the Mendelian principles of segregation, independent assortment, and dominance. The ratios …
Introduction: Sexual reproduction is the formation of offspring that are genetically distinct from their parents; most often, two parents contribute genes to their offspring. Among most eukaryotes, sexual reproduction consists of two processes that lead to an alternation of haploid …
A useful tool for analyzing genetic crosses is the testcross, in which one individual of unknown genotype is crossed with another individual with a homozygous recessive genotype for the trait in question. A testcross tests, or reveals, the genotype of the …
Mendel started with 34 varieties of peas and spent 2 years selecting those varieties that he would use in his experiments. He verified that each variety was genetically pure (homozygous for each of the traits that he chose to study) …
The cell cycle is the life story of a cell, the stages through which it passes from one division to the next. The cell cycle consists of interphase (a period of cell growth) and M phase (the period of nuclear and …
Like prokaryotic cell reproduction, eukaryotic cell reproduction requires the processes of DNA replication, copy separation, and division of the cytoplasm. However, the presence of multiple DNA molecules requires a more complex mechanism to ensure that one copy of each molecule …
The term gene was a word that Mendel never knew. It was not coined until 1909, when the Danish geneticist Wilhelm Johannsen first used it. The definition of a gene varies with the context of its use, and so its …
In 1902, the basic principles of genetics, which Archibald Garrod successfully applied to the inheritance of alkaptonuria, had just become widely known among biologists. Surprisingly, these principles had been discovered some 35 years earlier by Johann Gregor Mendel (1822 – …
Although the science of genetics is young — almost entirely a product of the past 100 years — people have been using genetic principles for thousands of years. Prehistory: The first evidence that humans understood and applied the principles of …