The document discusses plant breeding and inheritance of traits from parents to offspring. It explains dominant and recessive alleles, and how they determine genotypes and phenotypes. It provides examples of monohybrid inheritance in plants like pea stem length and uses Punnett squares to calculate possible offspring genotypes and phenotypes.
The document discusses plant breeding and inheritance of traits from parents to offspring. It explains dominant and recessive alleles, and how they determine genotypes and phenotypes. It provides examples of monohybrid inheritance in plants like pea stem length and uses Punnett squares to calculate possible offspring genotypes and phenotypes.
The document discusses plant breeding and inheritance of traits from parents to offspring. It explains dominant and recessive alleles, and how they determine genotypes and phenotypes. It provides examples of monohybrid inheritance in plants like pea stem length and uses Punnett squares to calculate possible offspring genotypes and phenotypes.
The document discusses plant breeding and inheritance of traits from parents to offspring. It explains dominant and recessive alleles, and how they determine genotypes and phenotypes. It provides examples of monohybrid inheritance in plants like pea stem length and uses Punnett squares to calculate possible offspring genotypes and phenotypes.
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Plant Breeding
How characteristics are inherited?
The characteristics of an organism are determined by the genes inherited from the parents. The parents may have different alleles of some genes and these may combine in different ways in the offspring. This gives rise to variation.
To explain how characteristics are inherited, we
can use the example of tongue rolling in humans. A person who can roll their tongue may have inherited one allele for tongue rolling from their mother and another from their father.
Dominant and Recessive Allele
We normally use alphabet to represent alleles; A, S, T (capital letters) are used to represent the dominant alleles, while a, s, t (common letters) are used to represent recessive alleles. The letters you choose are not important once you can distinguish the dominant and recessive allele.
If the allele for tongue rolling is R (dominant allele) and
the allele for non-rolling is r, a person who can roll their tongues would have the following combinations of alleles: RR or Rr. a person unable to roll their tongue could only have the combinations rr.
Genotype and Phenotype
When we write down the combinations for the alleles for a particular characteristic we refer to it as genotype as it describes the genetic makeup for example RR or Rr.
Whether the person is a tongue roller or a non-roller is described as the
phenotype: it is the appearance of the characteristic. Another example of phenotype is the eye-colour of persons: person A can have green eyes while person B can have brown eyes.
Homozygous and Heterozygous Alleles
Let’s start by breaking down the terms
Heterozygous Alleles: refers to two things being different or distinct from one another. For example the genotype (Rr) has two different alleles and the person is said to be heterozygous.
Homozygous Alleles: refers to two things being the same. For example, in RR both alleles are the same and the person is said to be homozygous for the characteristic. Example A:
If both parents are homozygous dominant, RR, then all the children will be tongue rollers.
Example B:
Let us see what happens if one parent (the mother) is RR and the other (the father) is rr.
Note: we use the punnet square to calculate the genotype of the offspring
Steps to use the Punnet square:
● Always place the
dominant gene at the top
● Match the first letter
of the dominant gene to the two recessive gene in the first two boxes
● Then match the other letter of the dominant
gene with the two letters from the recessive gene in the last 2 boxes
In this case, the father cannot roll his tongue, but the children will inherit R from their mother and r from their father. So all the children will have Rr as their genotype. As R is dominant, they will all be tongue rollers.
Example C:
If both parents are heterozygous, Rr, then the children could be rollers or non- rollers depending on which combination of alleles they inherit. We can draw a table to show the possibilities.
In both parents, half the gametes will carry R allele and the half r allele, so the table shows what the genotypes of the offspring are likely to be. When we consider the phenotypes, we can see that of the four possible combinations of alleles, three will be rollers and one will be non-roller.
Inheritance in Plants Characteristics in plants are inherited in exactly the same way as shown above in tongue rolling example. In pea plants, stem length is determined by a pair of alleles. Stems can be tall (T) or dwarf (t). If a pure- breeding (homozygous) tall plant (TT) is crossed with a pure-breeding dwarf (tt), then the offspring will be tall but heterozygous.
If the offspring of this cross are interbred, there will be a mixture of tall and dwarf plants produced as shown below:
The first crossing shown for the plants involves a pair of alleles which code for a pair of contrasting characteristics; it is called Monohybrid inheritance. There is not many examples of this type of inheritance in humans as most characteristics are controlled by a group of genes. For example, height is controlled by many genes: if you arrange people in your class in a line from the shortest to tallest there might be a big difference between extremes, but differences between individuals would be small.
In crop plants, some examples of monohybrid inheritance include flower colour,
seed shape and pod colour in peas, bitter taste in cucumbers and hairiness of stems in tomatoes.
However, the appearance of a plant depends on environment as well as on the
combinations of its genes. If the growing conditions are not satisfactory and plants do not get sufficient nutrition, they may not develop properly. For example, if plants are deprived of light it will lack chlorophyll, be unable to make food by photosynthesis and therefore will not grow to its full height.
Questions:
1. Distinguish between: A. Genotype and phenotype B. Dominant and recessive genes C. Homozygous and heterozygous genes
2. If both plants contain the heterozygous genes for yellow flowers (Yy). Calculate the genotype of the offspring using the punnet square.
