Genetics...phenotype...genotype...

More than recently ago, we did an activity in class. We made babies. (Nonexistent babies of course.) Each of us had a partner and we conducted an activity to create a child. Later, we drew pictures of our "children" and they were proudly posted on the wall of Mr. Ludwig's classroom. This activity, I believe was done to teach us about genotype and phenotype. Both very important key words when talking about genetics. I'll start off by telling you a little bit about the activity we conducted in class...
          After we had been paired up in partners Alii and I got right down to making our baby. The way the activity worked was we had a list of different features...eyes, mouth, nose, ears, freckles, no freckles, hair color, etc. etc. We flipped coins and used pencil and paper to decide what our baby's genotype would be. I was the daddy (haha) and Alii was the mother. After the genotype was decided this helped us to know what our baby was gonna look like. Which is the phenotype.

         So these traits-eyes, mouth, hair color, etc... is controlled by two alleles. There is the dominant allele and the recessive allele. The dominant allele is referred to this way because of its ability to mask the expression of the other allele. A dominant allele is expressed with a capital letter. The recessive allele is identified with the same letter but in a lower case form. Two identical alleles, for example- TT. (Which is two alleles for tallness in plants.) are homozygous. This means that if there were two parent plants that were homozygous all the gametes produced by these parents would contain alleles for tallness (T). And all of the gametes produced by shorter plant parents would contain alleles for shortness (t). So let's say there was cross-pollination between two plants. Then this new generation would have one allele for tallness and one for shortness (Tt) Because they had two different alleles they are considered heterozygous. Even though these plants had one of each type of allele, they were all tall because (T) was the expressed allele. This makes it dominant.
         This brings us back to genotype and phenotype. Genotype refers to the alleles an individual receives at fertilization. Phenotype refers to the physical appearance of the individual. For example- a person with Genotype TT (homozygous dominant) would have the phenotype of being tall. A person with the genotype tt (homozygous recessive) would have the phenotype of being short.
           In the activity we flipped the coins to decide which allele we would give to the child...it works sort of differently in real life...but you get the point. :)
So there you go! A kind of brief overview on genetics. And how genotype and phenotype fit into all of it.