Drosophila Melanogaster

Genetics is a fundamental part of life as it is related to how we receive and develop traits from our parents and what could be given to our children. The concept of genetics was started around 1856 by Gregor Mendel who conducted experiments with pea plants and established many of the rules of heredity now used in modern genetics. According to Corcos and Monaghan (1984) Mendel did not consider the two laws written by him to be laws at all but to be assumptions or a hypothesis that were later implemented as laws that we now use today. In the experiment conducted the species known as Drosophila melanogaster was used to help demonstrate heredity with each set of flies possessing a different mutation from the wild type. D. melanogaster are often …show more content…
According to Butz and Hayden (2014), the durations of the egg, larva, and pupal stages remain constant regardless of the parents age but the number of offspring produced by the parent would be greatly decreased which could lead to a lower number of results due to the lack of flies being produced. D. melanogaster have both x and y chromosomes like humans but the sex of the fruit flies is determined by the ratio of x chromosomes and the y chromosomes encode genes for making sperm. Baker and Ridge (1980) both claimed that sex determination in D. melanogaster is under the control of the X chromosome to autosome ratio and with at least four major regulatory genes, which can help explain how to identify sex-linked inheritance within the flies. The purpose of the experiment was to become familiar with the techniques of working with D. melanogaster, investigate basic principles of Mendelian genetics, and to understand the utility of chi square analysis. The mutated phenotype received was known as the bar eye type which vastly differs from the round eye wild type. Based off the parent generation females being mostly bar eye and only a couple of males being bar eye, it was predicted that the traits inherited were autosomal