1. Heredity & Genetics Notes

2. Who is Gregor Mendel? He is the founder of modern genetics. He used garden pea plants to study the way traits are passed from parent to offspring.

3. What happened in Mendel’s first experiment? Mendel chose to cross (pollinate) two pea plants and study several different characteristics. He called the trait that appeared most often in the offspring the dominate trait.

5. What happened in Mendel’s second experiment? Mendel then allowed the first generation plants to self pollinate and some dominate traits showed up, but once in a while something different showed up. He called this different trait a recessive trait.

7. What did Mendel discover? Mendel found that each plant had two sets of instructions for each characteristic. For example in the pea plant, the female parent could have sent the instructions for a wrinkled seed, and the male parent could have sent the instructions for a round seed.

8. Define the Vocabulary Gene- the set of instructions donated by each parent to offspring. Allele- the combined genes from each parent or both sets of instructions from each parent.

9. What is a Punnett Square? To understand the possible combination of alleles (both sets of instructions) that an offspring can have, let’s visualize on paper. Punnett Square- a diagram used to visualize all possible combinations of alleles that could come from each parent.

10. Define the Vocabulary Dominate allele- capital letters (PP) (Pp) Recessive Allele- lower case letters (pp) Genotype- the inherited combination of alleles (instructions from parents) Phenotype- an organisms appearance

11. Complete the Punnett square practice to see the probability of having a tall offspring.

12. Punnett Square Practice