Lethal Gene

Bio 101

Lab Report-Lethal Gene

4 April, 2014

Evolution-Recessive Lethal Gene

Introduction: In lab we conducted an experiment to see what would happen to recessive lethal genes over ten generations. Lethal genes or lethal alleles will cause an immediate death to an organism if they receive two lethal genes from their parents. Lethal recessive alleles must be inherited from both parents in order to cause death of offspring. In order for the offspring not to die, the offspring has to have heterozygous dominant traits or homozygous dominant traits. Parents carry either dominant or recessive traits to give to their offspring. Once the traits are given to the offspring, someone could now tell the genotype and phenotype of the child. A genotype is the makeup of organisms, or the makeup of alleles. A phenotype is the appreance of an organism. Natural selection is a reason why lethal recessive genes immediately die, because the traits and genes are giving to by random. Natural selection is the practice of adapting to an environment. This is all due evolution, which is a change in a line of descent. The population of lethal genes or alleles will change if the lethal gene population changes, either increasing or decreasing. A population is a group of organisms associated with the same species that are living in the same area. An organism’s population can change to different factors like deaths, births, or the movement of individuals between separate populations. I conducted a hypothesis on lethal genes, that by basically using natural selection, the lethal gene population will decrease as the generations increase.

Procedure: (Materials&Methods): To conduct this experiment our group needs a few materials to get started. The materials we need where two different color beads, a box, and a calculator for simple math. For the first generation we had to start off with the same population as everyone in the class, sixty green beads, which represented normal genes and...