A graduate student is studying a population of bluebonnets along aroadside. The plants in this population are genetically variable. Shecounts the seeds produced by each of 100 plants and measures the meanand variance of seed number. The variance is 20. Selecting one plant,the student takes cuttings from it and cultivates them in a greenhouse,eventually producing many genetically identical clones of the sameplant. She then transplants these clones into the roadside population,allows them to grow for one year, and then counts the seeds produced byeach of the cloned plants. The student finds that the variance in seednumber among these cloned plants is 5. From the phenotypic variancesof the genetically variable and the genetically identical plants, shecalculates the broad-sense heritability.
Genetic Variation
Genetic variation refers to the variation in the genome sequences between individual organisms of a species. Individual differences or population differences can both be referred to as genetic variations. It is primarily caused by mutation, but other factors such as genetic drift and sexual reproduction also play a major role.
Quantitative Genetics
Quantitative genetics is the part of genetics that deals with the continuous trait, where the expression of various genes influences the phenotypes. Thus genes are expressed together to produce a trait with continuous variability. This is unlike the classical traits or qualitative traits, where each trait is controlled by the expression of a single or very few genes to produce a discontinuous variation.
A graduate student is studying a population of bluebonnets along a
roadside. The plants in this population are genetically variable. She
counts the seeds produced by each of 100 plants and measures the mean
and variance of seed number. The variance is 20. Selecting one plant,
the student takes cuttings from it and cultivates them in a greenhouse,
eventually producing many genetically identical clones of the same
plant. She then transplants these clones into the roadside population,
allows them to grow for one year, and then counts the seeds produced by
each of the cloned plants. The student finds that the variance in seed
number among these cloned plants is 5. From the
of the genetically variable and the genetically identical plants, she
calculates the broad-sense heritability.
Trending now
This is a popular solution!
Step by step
Solved in 2 steps
