Blog #9

It's time for the genetics unit! Mary, Sosie, and I selected albino corn for our experiment. We are very excited to order and receive our dihybrid albino corn seeds so we can get started.

Some background information: the purpose of this experiment is to test the phenotype of a fast plant. A phenotype is the physical characteristics of an organism, as influenced by genes. A gene is a unit of heredity that is passed on from generation to generation and is responsible for the DNA makeup of offspring. In this research project we are choosing an environmental variable that influences the phenotype of an organism.

The variable we decided to test is fertilizer. We are  going to focus on how the amount of nitrogen in the fertilizer and see how it affects the growth and color of the corn. Albinism in corn is a genetic mutation so it is hard to tell if the seeds are going to be albino or regular until they are growing, so we will not know how they turn out until we start the experiment. We haven't yet come up with a hypothesis, as we are still coming up with details about the design of the experiment.