Monday 24 June 2019

Genetics Development - Day 5 - Testing the Genetics

Testing! Testing! Testing was the goal here. The main aim was to check whether the inheritance pattern of both sex and wing type were correct. I tested 160 offspring from the same parents (after confirming the parents genotypes using external editors) and the results were pretty amazing.

I nailed the wing type inheritance pattern, with an expected ratio of 3 normal : 1 vestigial coming out at 3.21 normal : 1 vestigial.

However the sex inheritance was out, with double the amount of females coming out than males. It should have been 50/50 but was more like 66/34. So this meant some exploring of the genetics of the flies to try and work out why. It took me an hour or so to figure it out, but essentially I had 3/4 of the alleles in the population as female, and only 1/4 male and was only looking at 'one' allele to determine sex.

So my parents were XX and XY (as expected) however I had it set to test only the 'main_allele' and thought that would make it 50/50, however for that to be the case the male would need to essentially be YY, which is so incorrect I could not have it! So, back to the drawing board, to try and work out exactly how these patterns are read by Minecraft.

I ended up doing what I 'should' have done from the start, and females are those with 'both_alleles' as X and males 'either_allele' as Y. This of course creates an issue if you breed two males together (which I still haven't figured a way to prevent) and get a YY... I actually don't know what Minecraft is going to do in this case, but figure, for the purposes of the lessons in and around this, it doesn't really matter.

So, now that I have both the sex, and the vestigial wing inheritance patterns correctly working it is time to try and throw more patterns into the mix, specifically the sex linked inheritance pattern of white eyes. A job for day 6!

Thanks as always for reading! Feel free to leave a comment below.


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