Fruit Fly Lab Report Fruit Flies

Fruit flies are often used in genetics work because you can discover which mutations are dominant and recessive. They have very short reproductive cycles, making it ideal to track their generations rather than organisms with much slower cycles. The average cycle of the reproduction for Drosophila melanogaster is 8-14 days, which allows the observer to find multiple generations’ traits in a short period of time. Additionally, it helps that the females reproduce a lot of offspring, making data points and predictions more accurate. Due to the fruit fly’s tiny size, scientists are able to keep a ton of flies under observation at a time because they don’t take up a lot of room. In our lab, we had a little over 100 flies in a test tube, which is

This lab related to real-world applications in science because it helps scientists discover how traits are passed throughout generations. These fruit flies help scientists understand how gene pools work as well as inheritance patterns such as sex-linked traits. Next, the scientist can use flies to discover how embryos and such are developed. The life cycle for a fruit fly is egg, larva, pupa, and the fly. This life cycle is a basis for human development and growth inside the womb as it is much more simple and quick. From the fly lab, we can determine that wild type is a homozygous dominant genotype while the mutation b is a homozygous recessive genotype. When breeded together for the F1 Generation, it was discovered that all of our flies were showing the wild phenotype. Consequently, our next generation had about 25% mutation b’s and 75% wild type for our F2 generation. This ensures us that our calculations of having both homozygous mutations to begin with was correct. An additional aspect that was determined from this lab was that these two types of flies have a lot of offspring with a short life

In addition to our hypothesis, we concluded that the traits are believed to be autosomal because neither of the two genders had a huge imbalance of the mutations. Although our observational data matched the predicted results, it is still possible that we may have made a human error. This could be from factors like we miscounted the amount of a certain mutation and such. In order to receive the best results, it would be most beneficial to have three trials for this lab. That would allow you to compare and contrast your data points so that you have more accurate end results. However, it is most likely that our group didn’t make jurassic errors due to the fact that our data and hypothesis matched perfectly. One error that our group may have made was that we might not have paid as close of attention to the mutations as we should have. The group was mostly focused on sorting the flies based on gender, and we didn’t check each fly individually for their mutation. Part of this error was due to the fact that we had so many flies and it was very time consuming to sort the flies just based on their