Traits

When a child is getting ready to be born, it is very hard for a parent to see what their child may look like in the mother because of how random it is. This is called independent assortment meaning that all options are possible. It all starts with genes from the parents to control what kind of traits a person has. These genes are all made up of alleles that are randomly selected! A child may get the randomly selected traits
which is called genotypes. Each genotype is made up of a selected number of alleles. To get the child's
genotypes you combine the parents genotypes.  These can be both dominant and resesive.  A dominant allele will make sure that the child has the trait and a recessive allele can skip a generation.  Once all of The genotypes have been made you then have the genetic makeup for your child and what it wil look like.  So as you can see chance plays a big role in what a child looks like. So.. this is what Traits means to me and what I learned about them.(:

Gel Electrophoresis

In the lab that we did during Biology was very interesting!! (: I really liked the feeling it when  Mr.Ludwig passed it around :) Anyways...  to start this lab our goal was to try and put three different colored in the gel holes and connected electricity through it too see how the dyes are charged after. The very step that we did was to make the gel plate. This was super simple (if you were paying attention!) We did this by making a mold that was more rectangular shape and put small slots in it to put the different colored dye. We learned how to use micro pipets to suck up the color to pour in the gel rigs. This was the most complicated part in the whole part because you had to be really careful how fast you pumped it out of the pipet and you had to try not to get any bubbles.   When using the pipets we had to get a new nozzle every time so that we did not contaminate the other dyes.  Once Then we poured in the hot get liquid and let it cool for at least for 15 minutes or so. After the gel was hardened in the gel rig, we let it sit for about fifteen minutes.  Then when we came back the dyes had moved.  The negative dyes moved to positive side like DNA would, but there was one positive dye that moved to the negative side.  They all had gone a different distance too, depending on how charged they were.  In all it gave me a good understanding of how Gel Electrophoresis is used to sequence DNA. This was probably my favorite lab that we did this far because the colors that we picked ended up turning out pretty in the end (: