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9: Principles of Heredity

  • Page ID
    192804
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    • 9.1: Mendel’s Inheritance Experiments
      Discontinuous variation is the variation seen among individuals when each individual shows one of two—or a very few—easily distinguishable traits, such as violet or white flowers, rather than continuous variation. Discontinuous traits are generally described as being dominant or recessive. Such traits are often referred to as Mendelian because Gregor Mendel’s was the first person to scientifically investigate and describe these inheritance patterns.
    • 9.2: Laws of Inheritance- Dominant and Recessive Inheritance Patterns
      Mendel studied cases in which a single gene controls a single characteristic. A diploid organism generally has two copies of each gene, one inherited from each parent, that may or may not encode the same version of that characteristic. Different versions of genes are called alleles. A genotype is the underlying genetic makeup for a characteristic, consisting of both physically visible and non-expressed alleles, of an organism. The phenotype is the observable trait expressed by an organism.
    • 9.3: Other Inheritance Patterns- Extensions of the Laws of Inheritance
      According to Mendel’s law of independent assortment, genes sort independently of each other into gametes during meiosis. This occurs because chromosomes, on which the genes reside, assort independently during meiosis and crossovers cause most genes on the same chromosomes to also behave independently. When genes are located in close proximity on the same chromosome, their alleles tend to be inherited together. This results in offspring ratios that violate Mendel's law of independent assortment.
    • 9.4: Pedigrees
      Pedigrees are diagrams used to analyze the pattern of inheritance of a particular trait throughout a family. Pedigrees show the presence or absence of a trait as it relates to the relationship among parents, offspring, and siblings.
    • 9.E: Principles of Heredity (Exercises)

    Thumbnail: Example of a Punnett square. (CC BY-SA 3.0; Pbroks13 via Wikimedia Commons).


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