March 29

Today, Mr. Finley announced we would get our tests back soon. The last person just took it. Then we started talking about growth. Mr. Finley had Rachel come up and compared them. Although they went through mostly the same processees, they were very different because they had different chromosomes. Then Mr. Finley made us do an activity on his website. We did the pea soup experiment. We had several pea plants with different combinations of chromosomes. We had to write down what we noticed about the peas and the simulation. Here's what I thought about the peas:

• Two parents


• Four children


• Both parents are brown


• Three children are brown


• One child is green


• Smooth and wrinkly textures


• Some parents and children are similar or identical


• They all have a combination of Y, y, R, and r chromosomes

This is what I noticed about the simulation:

• Use the radio buttons to mate two pea plants


• You can mate a plant with itself

Then we had to try and make a hypothesis that would allow us to correctly predict the kinds of peas that would be born when we breeded certain peas. My first hypothesis is that if you breed two plants with the same texture or color together, all the children will be the same texture and color. These were the results:

Parents: yellow smooth, yellow smooth

Children: Green smooth, yellow smooth, yellow smooth, yellow wrinkled

My next hypothesis was if there is at least one Y, it will be yellow. If there is at least one R, it will be smooth. If it's yy it is green, and if it's rr it will be wrinkled. Another hypothesis I had was that there will always be at least one exact copy of one of the parents among the children. These were both proven.

Parents: yy RR, yY Rr

Children: yy RR, yY Rr, yy RR, yY RR

We know now that all children will be made up of some combination of their parents' DNA. At the end of the period we figured out the hypothesis. Finley said we would talk about it the next day.

-LG Blog 4