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Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Is Dominance Always Dominant?

Through the online lab activity I learned that dominance is not always dominant. Sometimes the dominant alleles were not expressed even though most of the time they were. I learned that this is because there are three different types of dominance, dominance, co-dominance, and incomplete dominance. Dominance is when a dominant trait is always dominant, for example the pea plants. Whenever two heterozygous plants were crossed, one being purple the other being white, the result was always 8 purple homozygous plants. This is a perfect example of dominance. Although sometimes when purple and white plants were crossed it didn't create all purple plants this was because they were homozygous, meaning that although the dominant allele was expressed, the recessive trait was also present.The second type of dominance, which is co-dominance, is when the two alleles are equally expressed. One example of this is human blood type. If one parent has blood type A and another has blood type B then the child will have the blood type AB making it co-dominant. Another example that I found in the virtual lab was that if you took a spotted seed plant and breeded it with a dotted seed plant you got a mix of both. These are both good examples of co-dominance as both alleles are equally expressed. The last type is incomplete dominance. This was expressed in the snapdragon flowers in the virtual lab. If the red plants were combined with white plants then you ended up with pink plants. Since neither of the alleles were dominant they mixed together to create a completely different allele. If the plant was homozygous or heterozygous seemed to have no affect on how the plant turned out meaning that this was an example of incomplete dominance. These three types of dominance showed me that dominance was not always dominant. 

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