Homozygous tall pea plants look the same as heterozygous tall pea plants. Formulate a pollination experiment to identify whether a tall pea plant is homozygous or heterozygous. Explain your answer in 3-5 sentences..
One way to determine whether a tall pea plant is homozygous or heterozygous is to perform a test cross with a known homozygous recessive short pea plant. First, cross the tall pea plant with a short pea plant. If the tall pea plant is heterozygous, the offspring will all be tall. However, if the tall pea plant is homozygous, the offspring will be a 1:1 ratio of tall to short plants. This is because in a heterozygous cross, the tall allele will mask the expression of the short allele, resulting in all tall offspring. In a homozygous cross, the tall allele will be dominant, but the short allele will also have a chance to be expressed in the offspring.
use simpler terms
To determine if a tall pea plant is homozygous or heterozygous, we can cross it with a short pea plant. If the tall plant is heterozygous, all the offspring will be tall. But if the tall plant is homozygous, about half of the offspring will be short. This is because in a homozygous cross, the short gene has a chance to show up in the offspring, making some of them short.
