Imagine you are researching plants and you find that the variance in flowers per

Question

Imagine you are researching plants and you find that the variance in flowers per plant in a wild population of the species you are studying is 60 flowers per plant. Imagine you take a representative sample of the plants home, and grow them in an environment in which the critical nongenetic factors are very tightly controlled. You find that the variance in flowers per plant in your home-grown population is 15 flowers per plant. What is the broad-sense heritability of flowers per plant in the wild population of this species?

Explanation / Answer

The variation in flowers is due to the genes or genetic factors responsible for flower variation are incompletely dominant (hetero or hemizygous) and segregate independently. Thus, the flowers exhibit variation. For example, variation in flower color was observed first in Mirabilis jalapa.

Around 1900, Carl Correns used Mirabilis as a model organism for his studies on cytoplasmic inheritance. He used the plant's variegated flowers to prove that certain factors outside the nucleus affected phenotype in a way not explained by Mendel's theories.Correns proposed that when red-flowered plants are crossed with white-flowered plants, pink-flowered offspring, not red, are produced. This is seen as an exception to Mendel's Law of Dominance, because in this case the red and white genes are of equal strength, so neither completely dominates the other. The phenomenon is known as incomplete dominance

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