Today we did a practical exercise to illustrate the principles of segregation and independent assortment.
We used DrosophiLab, a free software package that allows for virtual crosses among fruit flies that can be set as homozygous or heterozygous for a variety of genes. On each cross one can generate anywhere from 1 to 50,000 offspring and perform different observations, including chi-square tests.
Following certain procedures students were able to test predictions (Punnet squares) by generating generations of flies, that were explained by Mendelian principles.
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1 comment:
It was a good lab....much easier to do than my high school lab that spanned months because we were using actual fruit flies in that. I liked the software, it made things go a lot smoother!
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