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10 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Simply put, what is selective breeding? |
When you take the best plants or animals and breed them together to get the best possible offspring. |
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Selective breeding is when humans... |
Artificially select the plants or animals that are going to breed, so that genes for particular characteristics remain in the population |
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Organisms are selectively bred to... |
Develop features that are useful or attractive |
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Examples of why things would be selectively bred |
Animals that produce more meat or milk. Crops with disease resistance. Dogs with a good, gentle temperament. Plants that produce bigger fruit. |
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The basic process of selective breeding is... |
1) From your existing stock select the ones which have characteristics you're after. 2) Breed them with each other 3) Select the best of the offspring, and breed them together 4) Continue this process over several generations, and the desirable trait gets stronger and stronger. Eventually, all the offspring will have the characteristic. |
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Selective breeding is important in... |
Agriculture |
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An example of importance of selective breeding in agriculture... |
Genetic variation means some cattle will have better characteristics for producing meat than others. To improve meat yields, a farmer could select cows and bulls with these characteristics and breed them together. After doing this, and selecting the best of the offspring for several generations, the farmer would get cows with very high meat yield. |
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Selective breeding is also used in... |
Medical research |
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Example of selective breeding in medical research... |
In several studies investigating the reasons behind alcoholism, rats have been bred with either a strong or weak preference for alcohol. This allowed researchers to compare differences between the two types of rats, including differences in their behavior and the way their brains work. |
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Some disadvantages of selective breed include... |
1) main problem - reduces gene pool. (Number of different alleles in a population) 2) Inbreeding can cause health problems, because there's more chance of the organisms inheriting harmful genetic defects when the gene pool is limited. 3) There can also be serious problems if a new disease appears. There's not alot of variation in the population, so there's less chance of resistance alleles being present. |
