Mendelian inheritance is everywhere, and it's really interesting! Let’s look at a couple of examples that explain the rules of how traits are passed down:
Pea Plants: Do you remember Mendel's famous experiments with pea plants? He focused on traits like flower color and seed shape. For example, if you cross a plant with purple flowers (which is dominant) with a plant that has white flowers (which is recessive), most of the flowers in the first generation will be purple. But in the next generation, you’ll see about three purple flowers for every one white flower. This follows the law of segregation, which means that gene pairs separate when forming gametes (that’s fancy talk for sex cells).
Human Traits: Eye color in people is another great example. Imagine that brown eyes (B) are dominant over blue eyes (b). If a person with brown eyes (Bb) has kids with another brown-eyed person (who could be either BB or Bb), they might have a mix of brown-eyed and blue-eyed children, depending on the genes they pass down.
These examples really show us how traits are passed down in clear patterns, just like Mendel taught us!
Mendelian inheritance is everywhere, and it's really interesting! Let’s look at a couple of examples that explain the rules of how traits are passed down:
Pea Plants: Do you remember Mendel's famous experiments with pea plants? He focused on traits like flower color and seed shape. For example, if you cross a plant with purple flowers (which is dominant) with a plant that has white flowers (which is recessive), most of the flowers in the first generation will be purple. But in the next generation, you’ll see about three purple flowers for every one white flower. This follows the law of segregation, which means that gene pairs separate when forming gametes (that’s fancy talk for sex cells).
Human Traits: Eye color in people is another great example. Imagine that brown eyes (B) are dominant over blue eyes (b). If a person with brown eyes (Bb) has kids with another brown-eyed person (who could be either BB or Bb), they might have a mix of brown-eyed and blue-eyed children, depending on the genes they pass down.
These examples really show us how traits are passed down in clear patterns, just like Mendel taught us!