Traits

     It is hard to figure out what a baby is going to look like because of how random it is.  This is called independent assortment, its when all options are possible.  It all starts out in the genes, the control what traits a person has.  The genes are then made up of alleles that are randomly selected.  The child gets what its traits are in a thing called genotypes.  Each genotype is made up of a select number of alleles.  To get the childs genotypes you combine the parents genotypes.  These can be both dominant and resesive.  A dominant allele will make sure that the child has the trait and a recessive allele can skip a generation.  Once all of The genotypes have been made you then have the genetic makeup for your child and what it wil look like.  So as you can see chance plays a big role in what a child looks like.

Stem Cells

When my teacher first said that we were studying stem cells at first I was confused about what they were.  It wasn't long before I got the basic concepts.  They are basically cells that can turn into any kind of cell.  With this fact they could change the way we treat injuries.  With this technology you could regrow parts of the body.  There are examples of this in animals such as star fish and salamanders.  These cells in general could just heal injuries fast and take the place of damaged cells.  This concept is very interesting and it will be a good thing for us people whenever the scientists learn more about it and we can start using it.

Mitosis in an onion cell

Onion Cell Stages

     To start this lab we first had to get a microscope and onion slide.  We then focused it it the best we could on the cells.  From there we took a diameter of the cells and then plugged it into the area of a circle formula so that we knew how many cells there were.  From there we looked for the different stages of mitosis and graphed the results of what we saw.  From this we noticed that cells spend more time in interphase and prophase because there was more of them in these stages when the cell was cut.  We could also tell that anaphase, metaphase and telophase were very short because there wasn't very many cells in that stage.  That is what we were able to get from the graph.