Chp 9    Why This Chapter Matters

1.     Humans have long relied on selective breeding to produce specialized breeds of livestock and pets. Mendel’s principles of inheritance are fundamental to the workings of artificial selection.

2.     Variations of Mendel’s laws explain the inheritance patterns of many human traits and diseases.

3.     Determining the probability of genetic diseases by following patterns of inheritance  enables us to anticipate disease and better address its consequences. Pedigrees and  genetic testing are an increasingly common part of modern medicine.

4.     Genetics and the inheritance of traits are fundamental to understanding evolution by  natural selection.

Chapter Objectives

Biology and Society: Our Longest-Running Genetic Experiment: Dogs

1.     Explain how human experiences breeding dog and food crops can provide insights into principles of genetics.

Heritable Variation and Patterns of Inheritance

2.     Define and distinguish between self-fertilization, cross-fertilization, purebred organisms, hybrids, the P generation, the F1 generation, and the F2 generation.

3.     Define and distinguish between the following pairs of terms: heterozygous versus homozygous, dominant allele versus recessive allele, genotype versus phenotype, and
phenotypic ratio versus genotypic ratio.

4.     Define the law of segregation and explain how it applies to reproduction.

5.     Define Mendel’s law of independent assortment and explain how it applies to a dihybrid cross.

6.     Explain how a testcross can be performed to determine an organism’s genotype.

7.     Explain how and when the rule of multiplication should be used to determine the
probability of an event.

8.     Explain how a pedigree is used to determine how a particular human trait is inherited. Define a carrier and explain how carriers are revealed in human pedigrees.

9.     Compare the frequency and method of inheritance of recessive and dominant disorders. Explain how a dominant lethal allele can be inherited.

Variations on Mendel’s Laws

10.      Define and distinguish between complete dominance, incomplete dominance, and codominance.

11.      Describe the selective advantage of people who are heterozygous for sickle-cell disease.

12.      Define and distinguish between pleiotropy and polygenic inheritance. Describe examples of each.

13.      Explain how the environment influences the expression of traits.

The Chromosomal Basis of Inheritance

14.      Define the chromosome theory of inheritance and explain how linked genes are inherited differently from nonlinked genes.

15.      Explain why researchers used fruit flies and how they created linkage maps.

Sex Chromosomes and Sex-Linked Genes

16.      Explain how chromosomes determine the sex of a human.

17.      Explain why sex-linked diseases are more common in male humans.

18.      Describe the general characters of the following sex-linked disorders in humans: red-green colorblindness and hemophilia.

Evolution Connection: Barking Up the Evolutionary Tree

19.      Describe the relationships between the many breeds of dogs.