Mendelian Genetics
- Why is Gregor Mendel often referred to as the "Founder of
Modern
Genetics"?
- What ratios of offspring arise in each of the generations (F1
and F2) in a typical monohybrid cross?
- Understand the following ideas related to Mendel's Law of
Segregation:
- Alternate versions of genes (different alleles) account
for
variations
in inherited characters.
- For each character, an organism inherits two alleles, one from
each
parent.
- The difference between dominant and recessive
alleles.
- The segregation of alleles during meiosis.
- Apply Mendel's Law of Segregation to an actual monohybrid cross
for a
given
trait. What is the phenotype and genotype (i.e. homozygous
dominant, homozygous recessive, heterozygous) of the parents and
offspring
in the crosses? What phenotypic and genotypic ratios
result from a basic monohybrid cross?
- What is a test cross? Why might a geneticist do a
test
cross?
- What is a dihybrid cross? What phenotypic ratios
result
from
a Mendelian dihybrid cross? Apply Mendel's Law of Independent
Assortment to an actual dihybrid cross. If two traits
"assort"
or are inherited independently, what does this mean in terms of the
relative
location of their loci on chromosomes, and how they "assort"
during
meiosis?
- How do Mendel's laws of inheritance reflect the specific
application of
the rules of probability? Be able to apply these laws of
inheritance
and rules of probability to genetics problems (see problems at the end
of this chapter).
- Be able to extend Mendelian genetic principles to understand and
do
genetics
problems related to alternative patterns not reported by Mendel:
- Incomplete Dominance
- Multiple alleles for a given gene.
- Pleiotropy
- Epistasis
- Polygenic Inheritance
- What is the difference between dominance and recessiveness at
both the
organismal and molecular level?
- What else determines phenotype besides genotype?
- Be familiar with some human genetic disorders that follow
Mendelian
patterns
of inheritance (cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, Sickle Cell Anemia).
Why are lethal or deleterious dominant alleles so rare in populations?
- What are some ways of testing a fetus for genetic disorders?