Drosophila Melanogaster: Fruit Flies

This may have been the cause of the low numbers of white lozenge in the F2 generation of flies. However, the cause of white eyes is a defective red pigment gene and should not affect the vision of the flies, whereas the lozenge gene should have a greater affect due to it causing the malformation of the fly's eyes. Therefore the lozenge flies should have also been in lower than expected numbers, but it was found that they were actually in higher than expected numbers making the validity of this argument questionable.

The parents are both homozygous. The homozygous dominant would represent the wild type. And the homozygous recessive would represent the other fly parent of a different strain. The F1 generation would consist of 100% Wild Type but they would all be heterozygous in carrying the recessive gene.

It was decided that there would be 80 vestigial flies and 20 wild type flies to total to an initial population of 100 drosophila. Next, the flies were anesthetized flies using Fly Nap. The flies were counted out to reach desired ratio, sexing the flies making sure there are equal amounts of males and females to be sure there is ample individuals to allow successful mating. The fly’s food was prepared by taking a frozen rotten banana, cutting it in half, mashing up the banana meat, and mixing yeast into it. The

Introduction: The intention of this lab was to gain a better understanding of Mendelian genetics and inheritance patterns of the drosophila fruit fly. This was tasked through inspecting phenotypes present in the dihybrid crosses performed on the flies. An experimental virtual fly lab assignment was also used to analyze the inheritance patterns. Specifically, the purpose of our drosophila crosses is to establish which phenotypes are dominant/recessive, if the traits are inherited through autosome or sex chromosomes and whether independent assortment or linkage is responsible for the expressed traits.

We started out with three populations; B, D, and G. In order for us to properly create controlled genetic crosses, we had to ensure that all the female flies were “virgins”.

The motivation of this lab report is to use Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance to analyze and predict the genotypes and phenotypes of an offspring generation (F2) after knowing the genotypes and phenotypes of the parent generation (F1). The hypothesis for this experiment is that the mode of inheritance for the shaven bristle allele in flies is autosomal recessive in both male and female flies.

Now mate a mutant F1 female fly with a mutant F1 male fly. Out of the 50 F2 progeny, what percentage of flies are wild type and what percentage are mutant

When the larvae hatched, the anesthetising procedure shown from steps 1-5 was used to record the phenotype of the F1 generation and number of male or female flies.

Purpose The purpose of this experiment is to determine whether the fruit flies were dominant/recessive or linked/non-linked. The traits I chose for this activity was the fruit fly with vestigial wings and purple eyes, the other fruit fly I chose was a normal fly, also called wild type. While writing out my plan for this activity I thought it would be interesting to test a female mutant and the wild type male, the ratios I came up for this experiment was 2:2 and the mutant allele being recessive to the wild type. In this case, the words recessive and dominant means, if the child born from the parents inherits more of the genes and traits from let us say the father then the alleles of the father is dominant over the mother’s genes.

Genes can either be sex-linked or autosomal. If a gene appears mostly in one sex chances are the gene is sex-linked and if it appears frequently in both sexes it is most likely autosomal. Using Drosophila melanogaster, also known as the fruit fly, we will determine whether the gene is sex-linked or autosomal. Drosophila melanogasters have a relatively short life span and are an excellent organism for genetic studies because it has simple food requirements, occupies little space, is hardy, completes its life cycle in about 12 days at room temperature, produces large numbers of offspring, can be immobilized readily for examination and

The vials were separated into males and females. Five male and female from each vial were put in a specific vial ending up with 20 flies in one vial. It was made sure the group had enough flies; any extra flies were distributed among the groups to assure everyone has the correct amount of flies for each genotype. The exact number of flies for all four phenotypes ( male (+/+), male (e,e), females (+,+), and female (e,e)) were used. Any remaining flies not need by anyone were put cake into the cultured vial where they came from.

The Drosophila melanogaster, commonly referred to as a fruit fly is used as a model organism to study genetics, evolution, or allele frequencies. They are easy to obtain and their generation time span is very short being only ten days, making it the best option to observe changes in a population in a timely manner (Johnston, 2002). In a study done by Johnson, they used drosophila melanogaster to observe a genetic drift occur to the population’s frequencies when put into different suitable habitats. They used the Hardy-Weinberg equation to calculate it and the results were mostly what they had expected. Many of the flies developed different types of eyes and wings (Johnson, 2009).

In order to test the null hypothesis, we must calculate the chi square (χ²) values and the degrees of freedom that are based on the numbers of each fly phenotype (including gender) we observed and what we expected. By using the ratio to calculate the number of each phenotype we

For our first generation (F1) of flies we chose to cross apterous (+) females and white-eye (w) males. We predicted that the mutation would be sex linked recessive. So if the female was the sex with the mutation then all females would be wild type heterozygous. Heterozygous is a term used when the two genes for a trait are opposite. The males would all be white eye since they only have one X chromosome. If the males were the sex that had the mutation then all the flies would be wild type but the females would be heterozygous.

In general, all living organisms rely on evolution by natural selection to better adapt to their environment. This adaptation requires mutations, or changes in DNA, that improves reproductive success, referred to as fitness (Tortoise approach works best, 2015). Therefore, fitness can be described as organisms that are proficient in producing off springs and fruit flies produce more off springs than tortoises so, they have a greater fitness. For the most part, I learned that a fruit fly life cycle begins when the female lays her eggs on a piece of fermenting fruit or sweet organic material. In fact, a fruit fly can lay up to 500 eggs, making it difficult to control the population and they’re hatching into small what larvae. For the most part,