Explain how inherited traits are passed from parent to offspring, and provide examples of inherited traits.
Answers
Given:
Given:
Inherited Traits
To Find:
Explain how inherited traits are passed from parent to offspring, and provide examples of inherited traits.
Solution:
Connecting heredity to chromosomes
A black-and-white photograph shows the researcher Walter Sutton from the chest up. Sutton is wearing a black suit jacket over a white collared shirt with a patterned tie. He has short, dark hair parted in the middle.
Scientists now knew how chromosomes behaved during both mitosis and meiosis, but they still hadn't linked Mendel's ideas of heredity with these observations.
Some thirty-five years after Mendel's work, however, American researcher Walter Sutton (Figure 4) proposed a connection between trait inheritance and the path that chromosomes travel during meiotic cell division and gamete formation. In particular, when observing meiotic cells in the testes of the lubber grasshopper (Brachystola magna), Sutton noted that it was possible to distinguish and track the individual chromosomes in these cells. He also noticed that these chromosomes existed in pairs that could be distinguished from other pairs by their size and that upon the union of two gametes during fertilization, the chromosomes in the newly fertilized cell maintained their original forms. Sutton, therefore, proposed that all chromosomes have a stable structure, or "individuality," that is maintained between generations. Bringing the idea full circle, Sutton also concluded that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs after gamete fusion, and their subsequent separation during the reducing division of meiosis, "may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity." With these words, Sutton first articulated what is now known as the chromosome theory of inheritance.