Gregor Mendel's Fruit Flies

Gregor Mendel's Fruit Flies

Introduction

From simple heredity experiments with garden peas, to cloning sheep, the field of genetics has come a long way. Now we are closer to mapping out the human genetic map due to advances in technology, and years and years of research. Perhaps the most influential and groundbreaking scientist, Gregor Mendel, he was responsible to provide a path to where genetics is now today with his experiments of garden peas.

In lab, fruit flies were crossed to observe inheritance patterns in their offspring. The motivation for this was to further understand how genes and characteristics are inherited. To use fruit flies would be much more effective and easier because of a couple of reasons. The genetic makeups of the flies only consist of 4 pairs of chromosomes. This makes it easier to spot characteristics, and is easily distinguishable. Another plus to using flies is that fruit flies can produce a whole new generation of offspring in two weeks, which is very convenient for researchers. This is why files are used instead of humans, but not only time, ethics have also been a major, if not the most important factor.

The traits observed here in this experiment were the wing types, whether vestigial or normal, and the eye color, whether brown or white. The genotype of the vestigial wing was a homozygous recessive vv. The normal wings were either Vv, or VV. The eye color was denoted by the genotype BB, and Bb for brown, and bb for...