Module 6 Lesson 4 - 6

Lesson Summary

During this lesson, you were to consider one focusing question:

• How do scientists track the inheritance of more than one trait at a time?

By learning Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment and how to build dihybrid Punnett squares, you can now follow the movement of two traits on different chromosomes.

This lesson has helped you to understand how to track two traits at the same time while still following all the inheritance patterns you have learned already. Learning to work with more than one gene allows you to be more efficient when working with inheritance problems. By working with more than one gene, you are able to see how traits on different chromosomes assort independently when producing gametes. Because these traits are on different chromosomes, similar to the figures on the different puzzle pieces of the picture, they have no effect on each other when being passed to the next generation. For example, pea shape does not move with pea colour.

How would traits be passed to the next generation if they were on the same chromosome? How would the movement of these figures be different now that the puzzle pieces are together? Mendel did not study such traits, but in later lessons, you will consider traits that tend to move together because they are on the same chromosome.