You are studying aging in fruit flies and have generated a number of homozygous

Question

You are studying aging in fruit flies and have generated a number of homozygous long-lived mutants. You now wish to determine how many genes these six mutants represent. You perform pairwise crosses with all of the homozygous mutants to each other and to wild-type (WT) flies. Results of this analysis are shown in the table below ("+" indicates all offspring have normal lifespan; "–" indicates all offspring have longer mutant lifespan).

(a) Are these mutations dominant or recessive? Briefly describe how you reach your conclusion.

(b) Based on these results, how many genes are working here to affect lifespan? Indicate which mutations affect which gene(s).

Explanation / Answer

1. Mutaions are recessive as when crossed with the wild type all had the normal lifespan.Nomral life span is the dominating factor even in presence of the mutation allele.

b when a particular mutant was crossed with itself it showed a longer lifespan we can easily say 7 genes are in play working on lifespan but the duration needs to be observed further. In the crosses with self a loger lifespan is observed however in crosses with the others normal lifespan is observed.

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