Predict percentage of offspring with flower colors in snapdragons
In snapdragons, there is one allele that produces red flowers and another allele that produces white flowers. Neither allele is dominant and heterozygous individuals have pink flowers. A plant breeder decides to cross a red flowered snapdragon with a pink flowered snapdragon. What percentage of the offspring do you expect will have red flowers?
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To predict the percentage of offspring with red flowers in snapdragons, we need to use Punnett squares, which is a tool used to visualize the possible combinations of alleles in the offspring.
Step 1: Determine the genotypes of the parent snapdragons.
- The red flowered snapdragon will have genotype RR (since it only produces red flowers).
- The pink flowered snapdragon will have genotype RW (since it has one red allele and one white allele).
Step 2: Create a Punnett square to cross the parental genotypes.
| R | R |
---------------------------
R | RR | RR |
---------------------------
R | RW | RW |
Step 3: Determine the possible genotypes and phenotypes of the offspring.
- From the Punnett square, we can see that there are two possible genotypes in the offspring: RR and RW.
- Since there are no dominant alleles, all the offspring with the RR genotype will have red flowers.
- The offspring with the RW genotype will have pink flowers, as mentioned in the problem statement.
Step 4: Calculate the percentage of offspring with red flowers.
- To calculate the percentage, count the number of offspring with the RR genotype (which is 2) divided by the total number of possible offspring (which is 4).
2 / 4 = 0.5 or 50%
Therefore, you can expect that 50% of the offspring will have red flowers.