1. Your Inheritance Eye color Height Hair color

2. Are you a “trait” or? Blonde hair or brown Curly hair or straight Tall or short Freckles or no freckles These are all physical traits, so how would you define “trait”?

3. How did you get your traits? They came from two gifts you got at birth. Sperm: inherited traits from Dad Egg: inherited traits from Mom

4. This transferring of traits from one generation to another is called… heredity

5. What do you call the study of heredity? Which, of course, is what we’re going to study in science! genetics

6. Who were the first people to really study genetics and why? Hint: A profession and not a nationality. farmers

7. No one really knew how traits were inherited or exactly what would happen when two plants or animals were crossed until the mid-1800’s and the work of… The “Father of Genetics” Gregor Mendel

8. Who was Mendel? an Austrian monk who loved gardening an amateur scientist who made careful observations and kept DETAILED records

9. He studied traits of pea plants passed from generation to generation. He crossed plants with different traits and carefully observed and recorded the results. What did Mendel do?

10. Some of the traits he observed: The shape of the seed: round or wrinkled Seed coat color: white or gray Seed color:yellow or green Flower position:axial (around sides of stem) terminal (at top of stem) Stem length:long or short Flower color:purple or white Pod color:green or yellow

11. Pretend you were Mendel. Look at the following results of his cross-breeding. What would you conclude? What do you think will happen in the next generation?

12. How would you explain this? Here’s what happened…

13. The purple trait was dominant over the white. How did Mendel explain this? Each flower in this generation had a purple and a white gene, but the white one was hidden. Now the white gene shows up again.

14. Mendel named the trait that dominated… DOMINANT The trait that was hidden he named RECESSIVE Note: Whenever a dominant and recessive gene are present, the dominant one will be the VISIBLE one.

15. What traits dominated here?

16. Through meiosis and the crossing-over of genes, God created us to be… totally unique individuals!

17. Remember: “You are fearfully and wonderfully made!” Let’s look at how we’re made by comparing some of the dominant and recessive traits in our class.