BIOLOGY 2

GENETICS
- is a branch of biology that deals with the study of heredity and variation.
- It explains why closely related individuals resemble each other.
- it also describes the processes involved in the development of new characters that explains
why members of the same species show variations in the characters they express.

CLASSICAL GENETICS
 HERIDITARY CHARACTERS - are characters that are controlled by genes.
Genes – are factors of heredity.

4 Types of Hereditary Characters

1. MORPHOLOGICAL – are those that refer to structure o form such as shape, length or color of body parts.
2. PHYSIOLOGICAL – are those that refer to functions of parts, such as rolling of the tongue, blood clotting
or color vision.
3. SEXUAL CHRACTERS - are those associated with being male or female such as internal and external
genitalia, hair growth at puberty, change in voice quality of males or fat deposition in the breast and hips of
females.
4. BEHAVIOUR CHARACTERS – are externally directed activities in response to stimuli. Instincts such as
crying and thumb sucking in babies are heredity behavioural characters.

MENDELS EXPERIMENTS
– an Austrian monk and botanist, is the father of classical genetics.
- he was born in Heinzendorf, Moravia in Austria (now part of Czech Republic)
- In 1844, he joined the AUGUSTINIAN Monastery of St.Thomas at Brunn, Austria (now Brno, the
Czech Republic) at the age 22.
- He spent 10 years (1853 - 1863) of his life experimenting on garden peas and another 2 years analyzing
his results.

 Why did Mendel select garden peas for his experiments?

1. Plant has several characters that exhibit two contrasting expressions or traits.
2. Another reason for Mendel’s choice that garden pea plants reproduce at a fast rate . Thus, a
number of generations can be produced within a short period of time.
3. They are also hardy plant; they do not need much caring and cultivating. Moreover, garden pea
flowers are structurally adapted for self – pollination. They have boat – shaped keel petals that
enclose the stamens and pistils. Cross pollination can be done by manually removing stamens and
introducing the pollen of flowers from other garden pea plants.

 Mendel’s experimental design includes three important steps:

1. Mendel studied one character with two contrasting expressions at a time, say seed color, yellow
and green. He produced pure- breeding yellow-seeded plants by allowing the plant to self-pollinate
for several generations.
This ensured that all the pea plants that he cultivated for the experiment produced only
yellow seeds from generation to generation. He followed the same procedure to produce pure-
breeding green seeded plants.
2. Mendel cross – pollinated the two pure breeding plants with contrasting expressions for the same
character. How did he do this?
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Mendel’s P1 Crosses

Characters First Parental( P1) F1

Generation Generation
Color of seed Yellow x Green Yellow
Shape of seed Round x Wrinkled Round
Pod color Green x Yellow Green
Pod shape Inflated x Constricted Inflated
Flower position Axial x Terminal Axial
Flower color Purple x White Purple
Plant height Tall x dwarf Tall

 DOMINANT TRAIT – trait is expressed

 RECESSIVE - trait that was not expressed.

 From the P2 crosses, Mendel made two important observations:

1. When the F1 plants that expressed only the dominant trait were self – pollinated, some of their
offspring (F1) expressed the recessive trait.
2. The ratio of the plants with dominant traits to the plants with recessive traits is almost 3:1.
From these observations, Mendel concluded that the F1 plants must have a pair of ‘unit
determiners’, one for the dominant trait and another for the recessive trait.
In 1903, American scientist Walter Sutton coined the term genes to refer to these ‘unit
determiners’ of heredity

MENDELIAN PRINCIPLES OF INHERITANCE

To make it easier for him to analyze the results of his experiments, Mendel decided to use letter
names for the genes that controlled the hereditary characters. Since character has two contrasting
expressions, he decided to use a capital letter and small letter to distinguish between the two. For seed
color, we will use the following:

G (capital letter) or yellow and

g (small letter) for green.
G and g are called alleles, or different forms of the gene for seed color.

Recall, though, that Mendel concluded that these genes appear in pairs. Hence, it will be more
appropriate to represent the two contrasting expressions in each plant as follows:

Yellow – seeded plant – GG

Green – seeded plant – gg

 Yellow and green are the physical expressions of the character for seed color and are called phenotypes.GG and
gg are genotypes, which describe the genes of the individual.
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 Gene pairs are describes as homozygous if they are made up of identical genes. Pure – breeding plants have
homozygous gene pairs for the character of interest. Hence, Mendel’s pure breeding yellow – seeded plants have
genotype GG and the pure – breeding green seeded plants have genotype gg.
 Gene pairs that are made up of dissimilar genes are described as heterozygous.
 When the gene pair is heterozygous, which one of the two genes will become physically expressed?
According to Mendel’s Law of Dominance, when the gene pair of an individual is heterozygous, only one of the two
genes is physically expressed. That which is expressed is dominant while the other that is hidden or not expressed
is recessive. The F1 generation produced from the P1 Cross has genotype Gg and phenotype yellow seed color,
hence yellow is dominant. While the gene for green seed color is also present, the trait is recessive, that is, it is of
physically expressed.

Mendel’s P1, Monohybrid cross

First parental (P1) generation WWGG X wwgg

Gametes WG wg

First filial (F1) generation WwGg

Genotype : WwGg
Phenotype: round and yellow - seeded plant

 Mendel then allowed the F1 generation to self – pollinate from the result of the cross (where the F1, is now the
second parental generation, or P2 generation), Mendel formulated his second law – Law of Segregation. This
explains how genes, which control the expression of hereditary traits, are transmitted from parents to offspring.
When the egg and the sperm unite during fertilization, the zygote or offspring receives two genes to make a pair,
where one gene comes from the female parent through the egg and the other gene comes from the male parent
through the sperm.
 According to this law, the two genes of a pair segregate or separate during gamete formation, so that only one gene
of a pair is received by each gamete. The female gamete is called an egg and the male gamete is called a sperm.
The heterozygous yellow parents with genotype Gg can produce two kinds of gametes, a G gamete and g gamete.
Mendel was aware of the operation of chance in the transmission of genes from parents to offspring. He knew that
the probability of producing a G gamete after segregation is ½ and the probability of producing g gamete from the
same individual is also ½.
 The cross between two parents with heterozygous yellow seeds produced a genotypic ratio of 1 GG: 2 Gg: 1 gg
and phenotypic ratio of 3 plants with yellow seed color : 1 plant with green color.

Male G g
Female
GG Gg
G

G GG Gg

Because the P1 and P2 crosses in this section involve the inheritance of only one character, seed color, they are
called monohybrid cross.