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 INTRODUCTION
Genetics is a field of biology that studies how
traits are passed from parents to their offspring.
The passing of traits from parents to offspring is
known as heredity, therefore, genetics is the study
of heredity. This introduction to genetics takes you
through the basic components of genetics such as
DNA, genes, chromosomes and genetic
inheritance.

Genetics is built around molecules called DNA.

DNA molecules hold all the genetic information
for an organism. It provides cells with the
information they need to perform tasks that allow
an organism to grow, survive and reproduce. A
gene is one particular section of a DNA molecule
that tells a cell to perform one specific task.

Heredity is what makes children look like their

parents. During reproduction, DNA is replicated
and passed from a parent to their offspring. This
inheritance of genetic material by offspring
influences the appearance and behavior of the
offspring. The environment that an organism lives
in can also influence how genes are expressed.

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DNA - The
Story Of
Genetics &
Cloning

INDEX

IN THIS REPORT:

 Introduction

 Section 1: DNA – the beginnings

 Section 2 : Cloning

 Section 3 : references

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DNA

INDEX
IN THIS SECTION:

 The Beginnings of Genetics

 Gregor Mendel

 Morgan’s Fruit Flies

SEC 1
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The Beginnings of
Genetics
Genetics is not just about understanding the reason
behind the similarities and why we look like our
parents.

It is also about coming up with a fix for some of

the flaws in our genes that cause genetic diseases.

Application of Genetics is not only limited to

practical matters like improving domesticated
animals and plants.

Centuries ago ancient anonymous farmers carried

out applications on genetics by breeding say for
example cows.

Generations of careful selection - breeding was

done initially to domesticate species and then
breeding only from the most productive cows.
This followed the rule that the most productive
cows will reproduce the most productive
offspring.

This effort provided the first insight but it wasn’t

until 1905 that a name was give to the science of
inheritance – “Genetics” by the British biologist
William Bateson.

An actual understanding of genetics was given by

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) when he published
his famous paper in 1866 but it was ignored by the
scientific community for over 3 decades until it

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was revived by some sceintists. Gregor Mendel
was after all far ahead of his time.

Gregor Mendel
Around 1856, at Abbot Napp’s suggestion,
Mendal undertook son scientific experiments on
heredity. He chose to study a number of
characteristics of the pea plants he grew in his own
patch of the monastery garden. In 1865 he
presented his results to the local natural history
society in two lectures and a year later, published
them in the society’s journal. The work was a tour
de force: the experiments were brilliantly designed
and painstakingly executed, and his analysis of the
results was insightful and deft. It seems that his
training in physics contributed to his breakthrough
because, unlike other biologists of that time, he
approached the problem quantitatively. Rather
than simply noting that crossbreeding of red and
white flowers resulted in some red and some white
offspring, Mendal actually counted them, realizing
that the ratios of red to white progeny might be
significant – as indeed they are. Despite sending
copies of his article to various prominent
scientists, Mendal found himself completely
ignored by the scientific community. His attempt
to draw attention to his results merely backfired.

Not only were Mendel’s results buried in an

obscure journal, but they would have been
unintelligible to most scientists of the era. He was
far ahead of his time with his combination of
careful experiment and sophisticated quantitative
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analysis. Little wonder, perhaps, that it was not
until 1900 that the scientific community caught up
with him. The rediscovery of Mendel’s work, by
three plant geneticists interested in similar
problems, provoked a revolution in biology. At
last the scientific world was ready for the monk’s
peas.

Mendel realized that there are specific factors –

later to be called genes – that are passed from
parent to offspring. He worked out that these
factors come in pars and that the offspring
receives one from each parent.

Noticing that peas came in two distinctive colors,

green and yellow, he deduced that there were two
versions of the pea-color gene. A pea has to have
two copies the pea-color gene. It must therefore
have received a G pea-color gene from both of its
parents. However, yellow peas can result both
from YY and YG combinations. Having only one
copy of the Y version is sufficient to produce
yellow peas. Y trumps G. Because in the YG case
the Y signal dominates the G signal, we call Y
dominant. The subordinate G version of the pea-
color gene is called recessive.

Each parent pea plant has two copies of the pea-

color gene, yet it contributes only one copy to
each offspring; the other copy is furnished by the
other parent. In plants, pollen grains contain sperm
cells- the male contribution to the next generation-
and each sperm cell contains just one copy of the
pea-color gene. A parent pea plant with YG
combination will produce sperm that contain
either a Y version or a G one. Mendel discovered
that the process is random: 50 percent of the sperm
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 produced by that plant will have a Y and 50
percent will have a G.

Gregor Mendel’s pea

plant experiment:
Mendel used the 7 traits in pea plants and each
trait had 2 forms. He then identified pure-breeding
pea plants that consistently showed 1 form of a
trait in the progeny after generations of self-
pollination and cross-bred these pure-breeding
lines of plants and recorded the traits of the hybrid
progeny. The result of the cross-breed was that all
of the first-generation (F1) hybrids looked like 1
of the parent plants. Example, all the progeny of a
purple and white flower cross was purple (not
pink, as blending would have predicted).
However, when he allowed the hybrid plants to
self-pollinate, the hidden traits reappeared in the
second-generation (F2) hybrid plants. This showed
us that the traits of both the parent plants in F1
were present in the offspring, but only one was
exposed. When the offspring in F1 became the
parent plant in F2, certain offspring showed the
hidden trait that was present in the parent plant.

Mendel described each of the trait variants as

dominant or recessiveDominant traits. Mendel
executed thousands of cross-breeding experiments.
His main finding was that there were 3 times as
many dominant as recessive traits in F2 pea plants.

Mendel also experimented to see what would

happen if plants with 2 or more pure-bred traits
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were cross-bred. He found that each trait was
inherited independently of the other and produced
its own 3:1 ratio. This is the principle of
independent assortment.

Mendel's Conclusions:

1.An individual has two copies of each gene, one

from each parent, from birth and there are
alternate versions of the genes called alleles. A
parent’s gametes contain only one allele for the
given trait, so when two gametes unite, each
parent contributes one allele to the offspring.

2.A dominate trait is always expressed while a

recessive trait is masked in the presence of a
dominant trait.

How do these traits get expressed?

Cellular DNA is the information source of making

proteins in the cell. A section of DNA that
provides information for one protein is called the
gene for that protein. Plant have hormones that
trigger growth. So, the plant height depends on the
amount of a particular plant hormone which
depend on the efficiency of the process for making
that hormone. If, for example, an enzyme helps in
making the process more efficient, then a large
amount of that particular hormone will be made
but if the gene for that enzyme has an alteration
that make the enzyme less efficient, then less
hormones will be produced. Thus, genes control
the genetical characteristics or traits.

According to the interpretation of Mendelian’s

experiments, both parents equally contribute to the
DNA of the progeny, which means both parents
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 must be contributing a copy of the same gene.
This means that each organism must have 2 sets of
all genes, one inherited from each parent. For this
mechanism to work, each germ cell must have
only one gene set.

Each gene set is present, not as a single long

thread of DNA, but as a separate independent
piece, each called a chromosome. Thus, each cell
will have 2 copies of each chromosome, one from
each parent. Every germ cell will take one
chromosome from each pair which may be of
maternal/paternal origin. When 2 germ cells
combine, they will restore the normal no. Of
chromosomes in the progeny, ensuring the
stability of the DNA of the species.

The Fruit Fly Experiment

The Sutton – Boveri Theory:
The Sutton – Boveri Theory – also known as the
chromosome theory is a fundamental
unifying theory of genetics which identifies
chromosomes as the carriers of genetic material
and that genes are located on chromosomes.

The theory was given by a medical student at

Columbia University, Walter Sutton & In
Germany Theodor Boveri independently came to
the same conclusion as Sutton.

Thomas Hunt Morgan & fruit flies:

The Sutton – Boveri theory seemed to dissatisfy
Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia. Morgan could

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not see how the chromosomes could account for
all the changes in generations.

The chromosomal theory seemed to offer no

answer to explain the variation observed in
offspring's.

Morgan had an idea & turned to experimenting

with flies (Drosophila melanogaster). Morgan and
his students used milk bottles to accommodate
flies and the flies breed and it takes a whole
generation about 10 days, and each female lays
hundreds of egg.

Unlike Mendel, Morgan had no catalogue of

established genetic differences in the fruit fly
beside him. And it is a difficult task to study
genetics until you have some distinct
characteristics you can track in generations.

Morgan’s first goal was therefore to find ‘mutants’

like Mendel’s yellow or wrinkled peas.

While normal fruit flies have red eyes there were

flies which had white ones. This was the one of
the first mutations Morgan observed. And he
noticed that white eyed flies were typically male.

It was known that the sex of a fruit fly—or, for

that matter, the sex of a human—is determined
chromosomally: females have two copies of the X
chromosome, whereas males have one copy of the
X and one copy of the much smaller Y. In light of
this information, the white-eye results suddenly
made sense: the eye-color gene is located on the X
chromosome and the white-eye mutation, W, is
recessive. Because males have only a single X
chromosome, even recessive genes, in the absence
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of a dominant counterpart to suppress them, are
automatically expressed.

White eyed females were relatively rare because

they typically had only one copy of W, so they
expressed the dominant red eye color. By
correlating a gene (the one for eye color) with a
chromosome (the X), Morgan, despite his initial
reservations, had effectively proved the Sutton-
Boveri theory. He had also found an example of
"sex-linkage," in which a particular characteristic
is disproportionately represented in one sex.

Morgan's fruit flies had other secrets to reveal. In

the course of studying genes located on the same
chromosome, Morgan and his students found that
chromosomes actually break apart and re-form
during the production of sperm and egg cells.

This meant that Morgan's original objections to

the Sutton-Boveri theory were unwarranted: the
breaking and reforming—"recombination," in
modern genetic parlance—shuffles gene copies
between members of a chromosome pair. This
means that, say, the copy of chromosome 12 I got
from my mother (the other, of course, comes from
my father) is in fact a mix of my mother's two
copies of chromosome 12, one of which came
from her mother and one from her father. Her two
12s recombined exchanged material during the
production of the egg cell that eventually turned
into me.

Thus, my maternally derived chromosome 12 can

be viewed as a mosaic of my grandparents' 12s. Of
course, my mother's maternally derived 12 was
itself a mosaic of her grandparents' 12s, and so on.
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 Recombination permitted Morgan and his students
to map out the positions of particular genes along
a given chromosome. Recombination involves
breaking (and re-forming) chromosomes.

Because genes are arranged like beads along a

chromosome string, a break is statistically much
more likely to occur between two genes that are
far apart (with more potential break points
intervening) on the chromosome than between two
genes that are close together.

If, therefore, we see a lot of reshuffling for any

two genes on a single chromosome, we can
conclude that they are a long way apart; the rarer
the reshuffling, the closer the genes likely are.
This basic and immensely powerful principle
underlies all of genetic mapping.

CLONING
Sec 3

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Index
Dolly the Sheep
Cloning is the production of an exact copy of a
cell, any other living part, or a complete organism.
Cloning of an animal was successfully performed
for the first time by Ian Wilmut and his colleagues
at the Roslin institute in Edinburgh, Scotland.
They successfully cloned a sheep named Dolly.
Dolly was born on 5th July 1996 and was the first
mammal to be cloned.

During the process of cloning Dolly, a cell was

collected from the mammary gland of a female
Finn Dorsett sheep. Simultaneously, an egg was
obtained from a Scottish blackface ewe. The
nucleus was removed from the egg. Then, the
nucleus of the mammary gland cell from the Finn
Dorsett sheep was inserted into the egg of the
Scottish blackface ewe whose nucleus had been
removed. The egg thus produced was implanted
into the Scottish blackface ewe. Development of
this egg followed normally and finally Dolly was
born. Though Dolly was given birth by the
Scottish blackface ewe, it was found to be
absolutely identical to the Finn Dorsett sheep from
which the nucleus was taken. Since the nucleus
from the egg of the Scottish blackface ewe was
removed, Dolly did not show any character of the
Scottish blackface ewe. Dolly as healthy clone of
the Finn Dorsett sheep and produced several
offspring of her own through normal sexual
means. Unfortunately, Dolly died on 14th February
2003 due to a certain lung disease.

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 Since Dolly, several attempts have been made to
produce cloned mammals. However, many die
before birth or die soon after birth. The cloned
animals are many a times found to be born with
severe abnormalities.

What Is A Clone?
A clone is an organism or cell, or group of
organisms or cells, produced asexually from one
ancestor or stock, to which they are genetically
identical.

In simple words, the term cloning describes a

number of different processes that can be used to
produce genetically identical copies of a biological
entity. The copied material, which has the same
genetic makeup as the original, is referred to as
a clone.

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 DOLLY THE SHEEP –

the first mammal to be

cloned.

The Cloning Process

Cloning is a process where scientists create an
identical copy of a certain animal. In cloning, the
scientists remove a somatic cell from an animal
that they wish to copy. They transfer the DNA of
the donor animals' somatic cell into an egg cell, or
oocyte. The egg becomes an embryo, which is
transplanted into a surrogate mother, However the
egg cell has had its own DNA removed before
transferring. A quick electric charge stimulates the
egg to start dividing. This egg does not need a
sperm to become an embryo. The egg later grows
into a young animal, this young animal is referred
to as a clone.

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References
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1. DNA – by James D. Watson

2. https://basicbiology.net/biology-
101/introduction-to-genetics#:~:text=Genetics
%20is%20a%20field%20of,is%20the%20study
%20of%20heredity.&text=Genetics%20is
%20built%20around%20molecules%20called
%20DNA.

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=zwibgNGe4aY

4. RESEARCH DONE BY : FAWWAZ

5. EDITED BY : JONATHAN & AARON

6. COMPILED BY : YAASIR, JONATHAN &

FAWWAZ

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