Unit 4 Reflection

In this lab, we modelled the passing of traits to offspring through sexual reproduction with coins. Each side of the coin represents one of the alleles of the parents and flipping two of the coins shows the resulting genotype. For modelling the gender of the offspring, one of the coins would have an X on both side to show the female's alleles. The other coin has an X on one side and a Y on the other. Flipping both coins simultaneously will result in either XX for female or XY for male. In the Dihybrid cross, we had a 4 coins. Two of the coins had A on one side and a on the other side. The other two coins had B on one side and b on the other side. Flipping all of them simultaneously represent a dihybrid cross. There was a margin of error from the results from the coin flipping and the predicted results from the punnet square. This is because probability isn't certain and probability is the chance something will happen. Even though the ratio between male and female offspring is 1:1, it does not mean that exactly half of the offspring is male or female. There is a limit to predicting offsprings' traits because they are often influenced my multiple genes and factors and are hard to predict with simple probability. This could relate to our lives because we could predict the traits of someone's offspring or whether they will get a disease or not. An example would be the probability of whether a child will get colorblindness which can be modelled through a punnet square showing X-linked inheritance. The main topics in this unit were the cellular processes of sexual reproduction and the patterns of inheritance. We learned about mitosis and asexual reproduction in which a cell creates a clone of itself. We then learned about meiosis and sexual reproduction. Next, we learned about Mendel's discoveries that would make the field of genetics and his laws of inheritance. We then learned about more complex patterns of inheritance that are what most traits are determined by. Some examples are X-linked inheritance, polygenic inheritance, multifactorial disorders, codominance, incomplete dominance, gene linkage, and epistasis. We finished the unit by learning in detail the notable types of crosses such as a heterozygous dihybrid cross and their phenotypic ratios such as the 9:3:3:1 ratio. My strength in this unit was punnet squares and the types of inheritance because I learned some of the topics in 7th grade biology. My weakness was in the process of meiosis and mitosis because it was complicated and we did not spend as much time on it as genetic inheritance. The genetic infographic at times helped or hurt my progress on the unit. It hurt my progress sometimes because we would spend the class doing the infographic rather than doing something that would cement the information learnt in the vodcasts. However, it also helped because we would have a general idea of a topic before learning it in the vodcast which made it easier to understand. Click here to visit my genetic infographic. By having to do the infographic, we learned a lot in doing projects. One thing we had to learn to do was create a diagram of the infographic before making it. This planning was essential because without it, we would have no plan in the infographic and it would take forever to create a result and it would make the project seem overwhelming. These were the main things that we focused on while completing this unit. Thank you for reading.

Genetic Infographic

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