A Experiment Of Mendelian Genetics

The Wisconsin fast plant also known as the Brassica rapa belongs to the crucifer family of plants, closely related to cabbages, turnips, broccoli and other vegetables. Brassica rapa plants are used because they are viewed as model organism, a species that has been widely studied and can be breed in a laboratory. It is an ideal model organism because it has a short growing process. About 2 weeks after the plant is planted it will began flowering, possessing the ability to produce seeds at high planting density, is categorized as a petite plant size, and lastly has the ability to grow under continuous fluorescent lighting in a standard potting mix. This plants make it easy to track the genetic information passed from generation to generation

At the start of this experiment we were required to obtain a set of four Wisconsin Fast Plants, which are genetically, known as Brassica rapa. These plants have been, “originally selected under continuous fluorescent light to grow and reproduce quickly for research purposes, these petite, fast-growing plants have been used for teaching biology concepts” (Wisconsin Fast Plants). These four pots that contain our plants will be under our watch for the next 16 weeks where we will show our results at the end of the semester.

There were two types of plants used. Both were of the same species, Brassica rapa but two of the plants contained rosette shaped complexes that were deficient in producing gibberellic acid compared to the wild-type plants. Therefore, they grew smaller and shorter as a phenotype. The Brassicaceae family includes cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, and many others. (

In order to test this hypothesis and prediction, an experiment was conducted using a heterozygous F1 generation of Brassica Rapa seeds. The seeds were planted, pollinated, harvested (F2 generation) and germinated for observation. When leaves were visible, phenotypes (green vs. purple) were counted and recorded. The experiment took place over 13 weeks, spanning the full semester of General Biology Lab I. The sections that follow will detail the materials and methods used, the results of the investigation and an in-depth discussion of the outcomes.

Introduction For this experiment, in my group we used the Wisconsin Fast Plant, which is also known as Brassica rapa. The Fast plant originated from the University of Wisconsin- Madison program from Professor Paul H. Williams. Fast Plant has a short life span that grows to about 40 days and can grow to be about 15 cm long.

Today’s lab incorporated the six steps of the scientific method to the growth and development of their own Wisconsin Fast Plant, also referred to as “Brassica rapa” in the scientific community. My group’s experiment included researching the effect of acidity on seed germination. The Wisconsin Fast Plant or Brassica rapa, was originally created by Professor Paul H. Williams at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The word Brassica can refer to many different plants such as mustard plants, cabbages, rapes, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, turnip, rutabaga, and the Chinese cabbage. The Brassica rapa plants were created to help provide a better understanding and more research on the Brassica plant’s family diseases. Brassica rapa plants are in the Cruciferae family, and are named this way because all of the plants have 4 flowers in the form of a crucifix.

Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, discovered principles of inheritance through breeding peas of different color and texture. He crossed several types of peas to investigate dominance relationships, variability, and genetic probability. Through his experiments, he laid down the foundation of inheritance that geneticists use to this day (Griffiths, 2015). From these crosses, Mendel pioneered modern genetics by developing seven laws of inheritance. The first and second law are investigated in this experiment.

The Brassica rapa has many common names such as field mustard, bird rape, colza, and keblock and is closely related to turnips, rapeseed, and cabbage. Wisconsin University researchers bred one species of the Brassica rapa to have an extremely short life cycle (seed-to-seed thirty-five to forty days) for a model organism in education and experiments. In addition to their short life cycle, they are ideal for these situations because they can grow without natural sunlight, without much space, they do not use an excess of water, and the changes can be seen from week to week.

From both graphs, the plant with two pellets and six pellets of fertilizer grow faster than zero fertilizer and four fertilizers. Compare to the plant with two pellets and six pellets, the six pellets one grow faster than the plant with two pellets. The plant with four pellets grow slower than the plant with no fertilizer. However, the data doesn’t make sense, so it is unreliable. Also, it does not support the hypothesis. The reason why the data is wrong, is maybe because the Brassica rapa was extract in the first week for measuring the length. Neverthless, it was a wrong action.Therefore,

The experiment commenced with planting over one hundred and thirty Brassica rapa plants. A large abundance was planted to ensure the large diversity of plants, which would also ensure a number of plants would be available to artificially select. Each Brassica rapa was planted with about one hundred and thirty plants to ensure the genetic diversity but this process first commenced by accumulating small plastic pots; it was important that these pots have holes in them so that they could be filled with wick. The small piece of wick would serve as a safety net for the Brassica rapas in case they do not receive water. The wick would temporarily keep the soil moist, so the plants would not immediately face peril. We also kept the soil moist

The average height of the wild type Brassica rapa plants treated with gibberellic acid was 5.91 cm and was taller after 15 days of growth than the wild type Brassica rapa plants treated with water, which were 5.60

Labels were first made for Intraspecific and Interspecific for each plastic pot measuring 6cm by 6cm by 8.5cm. There was 10 pots filled ¾ of the way full, with Sta-Green™-moisture mixture plus wood fertilizer, for each of the twenty groups. For intraspecific a control was set with one Brassica rapa seed directly in the center of the pot. Then 2 Brassica rapa seeds were placed together equal distances apart into two pots. In another two pots, four Brassica rapa seeds were placed together equally apart. The last two pots had 8 Brassica rapa seeds equally apart. The Brassica rapa seeds used in this experiment are Wisconsin Fast Plant™. For the interspecific groups,the plastic pots were the same as above and each filled ¾ full of the same potting

Fast plants were first routinely planted in Nepal by a farmer. Generations later, a plant explorer recognized them as brassica plants. She took seeds back to the United States and they were left untouched until a scientist was looking for a brassica plant in order to further study diseases that plagued plants of the same family, such as cabbage or broccoli. This scientist decided to use these Fast Plants because they had a much shorter life cycle than the other plant he was considering using (Williams). Instead of a year per each generation, fast plant’s life cycle is only thirty-five days long, as is seen from the image to the left. The plants usually are flowering in twelve to fourteen days (Wisconsin 1). A typical life cycle of fast plants is faster than other plants, contributing to its name “Fast Plants”. Typically, the cotyledon will appear within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, true leaves should form in four to nine days, and flowers will open in thirteen to seventeen days. By using Fast Plants, data is able to be collected quicker than if a traditional plant was to be used. However, in order to optimize growing time, certain conditions need to be met.

Gregor Mendel is known as the father of modern genetics because of the research and experiments he did by breeding pea plants and examining their physical appearances. He studied the plants seed color and shape, pod color and shape, and flower color and position. Mendel collected the seeds from pods produced after fertilizing two parent pea plants and then grew those seeds into new plants and observed how the offspring resembled or differed from the parents. After all of his experimentation, Mendel was able to conclude 3 principles. The principle of segregation, which meant that each organism has two alleles for each gene, one from each parent that separate

The results of part B were also conclusive but were as to be expected with both plant sets increasing in mass. The original mass of a individual seed was 0.036 grams with the total mass being 0.3 grams. The plants in the dark had a 833.33% increase with the individual weight being 0.3 grams while the plants grown with light exposure individual mass of 0.4 grams and a 1111.11% increase.