Fruit Fly Lab Report

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Drosophila melanogaster is recognized as the fruit fly and a very reliable model organism in the scientific world. In genetics they are utilized to study genetic mechanisms in order to understand genetic inheritance patterns in other biological organisms. Fruit flies are the ideal model organism because they are cost effective, have short life spans, are easy to maintain and produce a sizable progeny. The fruit fly experiment is conducted to observe how Mendelian extensions and basic principles affect fruit fly progenies from generation to generation. Mendel’s law of dominance suggests that recessive alleles are overpowered by a stronger, dominant allele. For example, a cross between a homozygous dominant and homozygous recessive allele will …show more content…

The law of independent assortment is an extension to the law of segregation and states that when numerous traits are acquired they will assort independently allowing them to occur together. In the experiment performed, which is modeled after Thomas Morgan’s original experiment, the inheritance of sex-linked and autosomal traits were observed. In this experiment it is believed that there is an autosomal trait and sex-linked trait present. The trait believed to be autosomal is being apterous and the sex-linked trait is believed to be the presence of white eyes. The parental cross produces mutant flies, which have no wings and white eyes or white eyes with wings. The P cross is Xw/ Xw ; ap+/ap+ × Xw+Y ; ap/ap due to the wildtype being dominant and white eyes being X-linked and being apterous is an autosomal trait that showed up in the F2 generation. Sex-linked traits will not assort independently and autosomal will assort independently because they are not …show more content…

Table 2 is the first fly count of my individual fly count and is a result of the emergence of the F2 generation. To analyze if the hypothesis made is true a chi square analysis was done and is table 3. Based on the chi it is evident that the hypothesis has to be reject considering that the chi square number is quite high. To figure this out for all the fly counts including the group 3 complete count the degrees of freedom were calculated. To calculate the degrees of freedom the number of levels of one categorical value are identified. There is two genders, male and female so this provides the first part: (2-1). Then the next number of variables for the next category are determined which are the 4 phenotypes observed so, (4-1). Finally the degrees of freedom are calculated, (2-1) × (4-1) = 3 D.F. Three degrees of freedom are present. The critical value for three degrees of freedom is 7.81 and the values provided by all chi squares are very high compared to the critical value and this forces the group to reject the

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