Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Does anyone really care about round and wrinkled peas?

I just took a Genetics test. We have been studying crosses between pea plants with round and wrinkled seeds until we look at peas and automatically start analyzing their genotypes and phenotypes. So unless you are really interested in genetics, I would recommend you skip to the bottom paragraph because this is about to get boring. Basically the whole test was on mitosis, the production of somatic cells through cytokinesis, meiosis, the production of germ cells through two cell divisions, chromosome structure, with regards to size, banding, and centromere position (metacentric, submetacentric, acrocentric, and telocentric), basic Mendelian Genetics, segregation and independent assortment, and how Mendel's laws works in the real world as far as pleotropy and epistasis. We also had to be able to work punnet squares, calculate probability and do test crosses and back crosses and know a little about sex-linked traits and the affect of multiple sex chromosomes on Drosophila. (I told you it was going to be boring)

It was our first exam of the year, the prof is new to Canyon and we had just gone over five chapters in class. There was no way to know what the test was going to be like. I assumed the worst and studied everything, read the book repeatedly, and quizzed with friends. It's a good thing I did. It wasn't an extremely tough test, but she expected us to know most everything and get all the correct answers too. So now my brain is fried, I have genetics pouring out of my ears and I am walking around like a zombie on drugs. Tomorrow I should be back to normal. We'll see.

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