Background: For two months, you will breed Drosphila melanogaster (fruit flies) and set up genetic crosses in order to determine the pattern of inheritance of certain mutant traits. The traits for which we will examine the pattern of inheritance are apterous (wingless), vestigial (crippled wings) or white eyes. These are all mutant strains. The normal condition (winged and red eyes) is referred to as the wild type strain.
Objective: The intial cross mates homozygous mutant fruit flies with homozygous wild type fruit flies in order to produce an F1 generation of offspring. The F1 offspring mate with each other in order to produce an F2 generation. This results in sufficient data to determine which trait is dominant or recessive, and if the pattern of inheritance is autosomal or sex-linked.
Assignment: You will complete a lab report that includes a title, introduction experimental design, procedure, results, and conclusion. The sections must include the following information.
Introduction:
Part I: Background information about Drosophila melanogaster
❑ Information about the structure of Drosophila melanogaster. ❑ Information about the life cycle of Drosophila melanogaster. ❑ Information about sex markers and sex characteristics of Drosophila melanogaster. ❑ Diagrams of male and female mutant flies. (may include diagrams in experimental design) ❑ Diagrams of male and female wild type flies. ❑ Information about laboratory culturing of Drosophila melaongaster.
Part II: Genetic applications
❑ Define: autosomal, sex-linkage, dominant, recessive, incomplete dominance. ❑ Statement of a rationale: in order to determine patterns of inheritance and support basic genetic rules ❑ Statement of purpose: in order to determine patterns of inheritance for the mutant apterous (wingless) strain in fruit flies ❑ Hypothesis: Predict the % of offspring that will exhibit the dominant