Biology Help -- Genetics problem

I'll send a private message to the guy who can help you out with this. Be patient.

Re: Biology Help -- Genetics problem

Your excercises deal with two genes (excercises a., b., and c.) or three (excercise d.) Each of these genes can come in two versions, called alleles, indicated by capital and small characters.

The "normal" cells have two sets of alleles for each gene. By contrast, the gametes contain only one set of alleles for these genes. For each gamete, its set of alleles is drawn at random from the two sets in each regular cells. (For details on how that works, Google "meiosis").

With this in mind, let's work through excercise #a. The gamete will have one instance of gene a and one of gene b. The two copies in the organism producing the gametes has different alleles for each gene. So, in the gamete, the gamete's allele of gene a could either be a or A (with equal probabilities), and the allele for gene b could either be b or B (also with equal probabilities. This yields the folowing probabilities for the genome of the gamete:

ab (25%)
aB (25%)
Ab (25%)
AB (25%).

I hope you now understand the question, and can solve excercises b-d on your own.

PS, I'm not the guy Setanta PM'ed. I have a feeling who it is, and if he posts something different than I do, I'll defer to his judgment.

d. AaBBCc

It looks like it might last longer than the 7 minutes American men are reputed to last according to a survey the United Nations "Let's Do Some Surveys Dep't" did about 18 months back.

I like the Cc ending as well. Quite witty I thought.