Basic Genetics

This is a cool homework assignment!

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/

Before I start looking at the rest of the website, here are the two (okay, four) interesting things I learned:

Traits are a quality or characteristic that we have, and our combination of different traits makes us unique. We get our traits from our parents, and we will pass them on in our children. While our DNA has instructions for our traits, we can easily have our traits changed by environmental factors. For instance, the "tour" said that our hair color can be changed by sunlight and hair dyes. I never really thought of using sunlight to change your hair color!

Being able to bend your thumb back is called the hitchhiker's thumb allele (uh-LEEL), an allele being a trait. Sadly, even though that ability seems cool, I cannot do bend back my thumb (or curl up my tongue).

When someone has two alleles, like one for a hitchhiker's thumb and one for a straight thumb, they interact. One, the "dominant" trait, dominates over the other one and is what people see (hence the name dominant). The "recessive" trait jumps out your ear, never to be seen again! No, it's still there, it's just, to use their word, "masked" by the other trait. Having two of the same allele for a trait is called homozygous, and having two different ones is called heterozygous. Apparently, traits can also combine, called "incomplete dominance"- so taking a red carnation and a white carnation could make a pink carnation.

When an egg cell and a sperm cell join, they form one cell called a zygote, which has all 46 chromosomes that cells usually have.

I don't quite understand this statement: "Traits influenced by just one gene are rare. These are called 'single gene traits' " Perhaps reading (and watching) some more will provide some enlightenment.

Some big words (FYI animefreak44, these are hard to spell, not hard to understand):

DNA= Deoxyribonucleic Acid

The "alphabet" of DNA= A pairs with T, C pairs with G

A=Adenine
T=Thymine
C=Cytosine
G=Guanine

I must explore the rest of the site, so I'll stop typing now.

EDIT: This assignment still isn't due, so I suppose it's okay to add stuff to it. :)

I haven't looked at everything because I've been spending time practicing piano and generally being lazy, but I did look at some other things.

I think that the extracting DNA experiment is pretty cool. We don't get to do much since the computer does most of it for you, but it made me remember the time when I got to extract DNA in real life (from some type of dried plant, I think) at a museum. The DNA looked like a bunch of white, whispy strands. Considering how small DNA is, I was surprised (well, shocked really) that we could see it at all. Sunnyd, are we going to get to extract DNA?

One of the other activities I tried was Mouse Party, which talked about the effects of drugs on the brain (of mice). The mice were kind of disturbing, but that's what taking bad drugs does to you. Anyway, drugs can really mess up your brain, and the "game" showed how the drugs disrupted certain recepters, causing the effects of the drug.

The last activity I tried had to do with genetic therapy, I believe. It was called Space Doctor, and you had to use gene therapy to treat your patients. I only got to treat one patient before I had to go eat dinner (yes, I'm typing this several days later) but I did get it right on the first try. Apparently, you insert genes into viruses (you have to be careful about the type of virus, though) and the newly-modified virus inserts the gene, or allele (see! I'm using vocabulary! Yay!) into the cell. The pictures of the aliens and their environments aren't that great, but it's certainly a cool activity.