Genetics (The Basics)

This week in AP Biology we talked about genetics.Genetics is the study of heredity and heredity is a process where a parent passes certain genes to their offspring. The main thing we discussed this week is Mendelian Genetics, which is pretty much mainly focused around punnet squares. Punnet squares are a diagram that predicts the outcome of offspring. For this to work you need the genotype from the father and the mother. A genotype is the genetic makeup of an organism. The genotype in a punnet square are the letters that stand for one or several genotypes in the mother and father. Another thing we talked about were recessive and dominant alleles. Recessive alleles are alleles that are suppressed when a dominant allele is present and a dominant allele is an allele that always shows up unless there is a homozygous recessive allele present. Genetics is a very simple subject to learn about, but it is also extremely interesting to talk about as well.