Essay On Brassica Rapa

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The plants of the genus Brassica include species very important for research and agricultural purposes including vital vegetable and oilseed crops (Augustine 2013). Research for these plants typically aim to increase their nutritional value and develop traits such as herbicide tolerance, sterility, and disease and pest resistance (Gupta 2012). One plant that can be used for research is Brassica rapa, in the form of Wisconsin Fast Plants, which are a rapid cycling variety that can be used for genetics investigations (Kinds Plants 2014).
Mendel’s law of segregation states that offspring receive only one of two alleles of a gene from the parent (Brooker et al. 2014). This means that utilizing a monohybrid cross where each parent has both a dominant allele of a gene and a recessive allele, that by producing offspring of these plants, a predictable outcome of trait inheritance should be observed (Brooker et al. 2014). This experiment investigated the inheritance of anthocyanin in Brassica rapa.
Anthocyanin is a purple colored pigment in plants that protect tissue from stressful light conditions (Glover and Martin 2012). This experiment utilized monohybrid crosses of the Wisconsin Fast Plant variety of B. rapa with the F_1 generation having one dominant allele for anthocyanin (ANL) and one recessive allele (anl) (Kinds Plants 2014), to complete their life cycle and produce offspring that were observed for their phenotype. By utilizing the genotype of each parent a prediction for the outcome of these genetic crosses was formulated with a Punnett square (Brooker et al. 2014). Since two alleles need to be existent for a recessive trait to be conveyed, and only one allele for a dominant trait (Morgan and Carter 2008), the offspri...

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With plants of the genus Brassica importance in the form of vegetables and oilseeds (Wang and Freeling 2013), the results of this experiment offer a view into their inheritance patterns which can in the long term be replicated for different outcomes. Augustine et al. discuss the importance of these plants’ traits in terms of food production by stating that studying the mutations of Brassica may lead to improvement of crops by expressing mutations that are desirable phenotypic traits (2014). Brassica are an important part of the global food supply and if any plants can be genetically altered by selective fertilization then those steps should be taken to produce larger, more efficient, or shorter cycling plants. This experiment has supported the inheritance of traits according to Mendel by examining the inheritance of anthocyanin in B. rapa.

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