Punnett Squares on Thursday, February 3 and Dragon Genetics on Friday, February 4

Hi Everyone

On Thursday and Friday we mainly focused on doing the Punnett Square problems and did a couple of other things.

The first thing we did on Thursday was go through the Punnett Squares Sheet. Which was due for homework. If you lost it and would like to go over it again you can find it here. After that we were given a choice of what we wanted to do. It was either to work on a new sheet which is due tomorrow or it was to do something on a website called Dragon Genetics. In the end the class decided to do the sheet which is called More Punnett Square Problems. And for the rest of the class we did the sheet that is due tomorrow. This also applies to people that did Math Counts. Remember to print it from Moodle if you already lost it. If you are unclear about Punnett Squares this video might help.

The picture below shows two different alleles matched up using a Punnett Square. The t means the height. An uppercase T means taller. A lower case means shorter. You can see that the parent on the left is taller because he has a dominant uppercase T and a recessive lowercase t. The top parent has two recessive alleles which means that he/she is shorter.

On Friday's class we went to the computer lab and did the activity that we chose not to do. We did the Dragon Genetics. That can be found here. The assignment we did on Friday was a website in which we chose the correct traits for a dragon given the alleles of the parents. After we did this we were free to do whichever topic we wanted from the we

bsite. This included things like incomplete dominance and co-dominance and how does DNA work.

Below: Gregor Mendel - Austrian Scientist and Monk (Creator of the Punnett Square)

Thanks for reading!

I almost forgot. The Next Scribe is Dan.

The First Scribe Post of the Quarter - Class on Thursday, January 27th, and Friday, January 28th

Hi everyone and welcome to the first blog post of the 3rd quarter!

Our requirements have changed a little bit, and the more detailed information can be found here. The main change is that we have to do less comments; only one per every two weeks! The next one is due on Friday, February 4th.

Thursday's class

On Thursday we immediately started working on our "Genetics Relationships" projects. We had a sheet with directions and a rubric. The project was mainly about defining words and then explaining how they are related with genetics and each other. The words we had to define were:

• Deoxyribose sugar
• Centromere
• Recessive/Dominant allele
• Proteins
• Heredity
• Genetics
• Adenine
• Thymine
• Guanine
• Cytosine
• Nitrogen Bases
• Genes
• Alleles
• Chromatin
• Chromosome
• Hybrid
• Gregor Mendel
• Homozygous
• Heterozygous
• Chromatids
• DNA
• Traits
• Purebred
• Fertilization
• Double Helix
• Phosphates

Almost everyone presented their project on Thursday;

Sophie, Noam and Ciprian:

Iva, Terez, and Vance (Iva missing):

Calvin, Bryce, and Antonia (Antonia missing):

and Gio and Reza (Reza missing):

Here is the song "It's Called Genetics" from "Bill Nye the Science Guy"'s show:

Our homework for Friday was to read pages 84-89, which was the section "Probability and Heredity".

Friday's Class

When we came to class, Val and Viktor (me) presented their "Genetics Relationships" project:

We started discussing Gregor Mendel (an Austrian monk who started studying heredity, and combined pea plants to get different combinations) and his work, and after that we discussed our homework and what "homo" and "hetero" mean. "Homo" means "the same" and "hetero" means "different". We also discussed people having three sex chromosomes, such as XXX or XXY. This often leads to Down Syndrome, which you can read more about here. Jamie Lee Curtis is a famous actress who has three sex chromosomes, as well as Lady GaGa. People who have this disorder are called hermaphrodites.

After that, we started talking about Punnett squares. Here is what a Punnett square looks like.

Then, we worked on the Bikini Bottom Genetics sheet that we got from Ms. D, which we have to finish for Tuesday (but only the front page!) If you want to, you can do the back page as well.

That's all we did these two days; remember to check the Science Moodle page for information about homework and other assignments.

The next scribe is Ciprian - good luck! :)

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Vocabulary used in this scribe post:

Genetics: The scientific study of heredity.

Heredity: The passing of traits from parent to child.

Chromosomes: A combination of two identical chromatids and a centromere, holding DNA, found in the nucleus of the cell.

Sex chromosomes: The chromosomes "X" and "Y", used to determine your gender. Usually you have two sex chromosomes, XX if you're a girl, and XY if you're a boy. This is not the case if you are a hermaphrodite.

Punnett squares: Charts that show possible combinations of alleles passed on from parents.