Genetics Blog

Derek Sederman

Genetics are a very interesting topic. From the reebops project I learned about all of the different types of genes and how they can influence a species appearance. The basic genes are dominant and recessive. A dominant gene is represented by a capital letter and if it is paired with a recessive gene the trait that it represents will be shown. A recessive gene is represented by a lower-case letter and if it is paired with a dominant gene the dominant gene's trait will shown. Also there are more complex types of genes. Those genes are co-dominant and incomplete dominant genes. If two co-dominant genes are paired together both traits will show independently. For example, in the reebops project there were two co-dominant genes for body color. They were brown and green. So if a bug had a green gene and a brown gene, half of the bug would be brown and the other half would be green. So the bug would look like the picture below.

The other complicated type of gene is an incomplete dominant gene. If two incomplete dominant gens are paired together a combination of the two genes will appear. For example if a flower had two incomplete dominant genes for color that where white and red, the two colors would mix and the flower would be pink.