Chapter 18 Greenhouse Operation & Maintenance Vocab

In a classic experiment using pea shape, mendel conducted two separate genetic crosses. in the first cross the parent plants were “true breeding” for pea shape; one had round peas ( r )and the other had wrinkled (r). the first cross produced a filial 1 generation of all round peas. in the second cross, mendel bred plants from the filial 1 generation. this cross produced different results. out of approximately 1000 plants, about 75% were round and 25% were wrinkled.

Bisphenol a (often called bpa) is a chemical found in products that people use every day, from water bottles to food containers to children's toys. unfortunately, bpa leaches out of its many products and makes its way into our bodies. what are the health effects of bpa exposure? ongoing research is finding that elevated exposure to bpa can affect a wide variety of developmental and physiological processes, but one of the first studies of bpa's health effects came about because of a simple mistake in the lab. at a laboratory at case western reserve university in 1998, geneticist patricia hunt was making a routine check of her female lab mice. as she extracted and examined developing eggs from the ovaries, she began to wonder what had gone wrong. she noticed that many of the eggs showed problems with their chromosomes, and some had irregular amounts of genetic material, which can lead to miscarriages and birth defects in mammals. she learned that a lab assistant had mistakenly washed the plastic mouse cages and water bottles with a harsh soap, releasing bpa from the plastic. knowing that bpa is an endocrine disruptor, a chemical that can enter organisms and mimic hormones, hunt set out to discover whether it had adversely affected her mice.

To answer this question, researchers studied populations of the dusky salamander (desmognathus ochrophaeus) living on different mountain ranges in the southern appalachian mountains. the researchers tested the reproductive isolation of pairs of salamander populations by leaving one male and one female together and later checking the females for the presence of sperm. four mating combinations were tested for each pair of populations (a and b)—two within the same population (female a with male a and female b with male b) and two between populations (female a with male b and female b with male a). the proportion of successful matings for each mating combination was measured. for example, when all the matings of a particular combination were successful, the researchers gave it a value of 1; when none of the matings were successful, they gave it a value of 0. then the researchers calculated an index of reproductive isolation that ranged from 0 (no isolation) to 2 (full isolation). the reproductive isolation value for two populations is the sum of the proportion of successful matings of each type within populations (aa + bb) minus the sum of the proportion of successful matings of each type between populations (ab + ba). the table provides data for the geographic distances and reproductive isolation values for 27 pairs of dusky salamander populations.