By: Sebastian Eusse 7°2 The Columbus School

Have you ever wonder how will your children look a like? We can use genetics to help solve this problem. Genetics is the study of how traits are passed from a parent to a new offspring.

The father of Genetics is Known as Gregor Mendel. Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk who presented experiments to help solve this questions. He used pea plants for his experiments and observed their traits. Traits are the characteristics that makes us unique. Like eye color or hair type First Mendel crossed True-breeding plants which means both parents have the same trait. In the case of Mendel’s Experiment the trait was Purple flowers or White flowers. When Mendel combined flowers of the same color the result was a flower of the same color. But when he combined flowers of a different color Mendel saw that all flowers were purple. As a conclusion Mendel said that purple is a dominant trait and white is a recessive trait.

A Dominant trait is a factor that blocks another genetic factor. They can be seen When They are standing next to another dominant trait or when standing next to a recessive trait. A Recessive trait is a factor that its blocked by the presence off a dominant factor. They can only be seen when they are standing next to another recessive factor.

There are different types of alleles for an specific trait. Alleles are the difference forms of a gene. For example the different alleles for hair type are straight, curly, wavy. Dominant Alleles can be written with capital letter and a recessive with a lower case. For example Brown eyes are dominant to blue eyes so they are written as B and blue as are recessive so they are b. We get two alleles from our parents, whether is a dominant or a recessive. When we get two alleles that are the same we know that as homozygous When we get two different alleles we know it as heterozygous. There are two types of homozygous. A recessive and a dominant. Homozygous dominant is when both alleles are dominant, like BB or SS Homozygous recessive is when both alleles are recessive, like bb or ss

All different letter combinations are all genotypes. Genotypes are all the different combinations of two alleles. Genotypes are scene as letter combination. For example if you have brown eyes your genotype would be BB or Bb. If you have blue eyes it would be bb. Genotype also determines Phenotype. Phenotype is how Genotype is physically shown or how a trait appears or is expressed. If your genotype for eye color is BB your Phenotype is Brown eyes.

To help us predict how our children would look, we use punnett squares. Making a punnett square is easy. First draw a box. Then draw a line that goes threw the middle of the box horizontally and vertically. The third step is to put your fathers genotype for a trait like eye color, on top of the box and your mothers genotype on the left side. The fourth step is to drag down your fathers genes to each one of the box, do the same for your mothers. Then see the what colors you could have had