Again, it's a little out of order, but I'm actually going to talk about complementation first. So, a complementation test is performed in order to determine if two mutants with the same phenotype have mutations in the same gene. So if you do this huge, like, cross or this huge experiment with flies, for instance, and you have thousands of them, and you come across a couple with the same gene or the same phenotype. They all have really short legs, for instance. So you can do a complementation test where you mate them together to figure out whether or not those short legs mutations that you find are all in the same gene, like a short leg gene, or if there are mutations in multiple genes causing the same phenotype. So how you perform a complementation test is you take the two mutants that you have, and if they're recessive mutations, you can mate them together. And when you do that, if the offspring are wild type, meaning that they have long legs, they don't have that short leg phenotype, then the two mutations are in different genes. If they're mutant, that means the two mutations are in the same genes. Same genes, not different, same. Now, sorry about that. I will go back and edit that so it's clear in your handout. But just know, these are in the same genes. Now, why is that the case? Well, because if you have two mutants, say, mutant one and mutant two. And, here's their mutations. If they're in the same genes, when you do this cross, you're going to get them all with mutants. Right? That's what the cross is going to look like. But if instead, it's in two genes, so what this would look like is this, you would have rr and ss, and ss. Right? So these the ones with the pluses are the wild type, the without or without. Then you would do a dihybrid cross. Because now you're looking at two different genes. Now, I'm not going to fill out. But just know that you're not going to get this recessive phenotype with a dihybrid cross because all of the offspring will have a wild type of both genes. So they all appear wild type. So that's how that works. So let's look at an example here. So say you have three white mutants, one, two, and three, and you want to know if the mutation causing them to be white is in the same gene for each mutant, and the wild type color is normally blue. So this question is asking which mutations complement. And so what if you get the question like that, what does that mean? It says, which mutations complement, meaning that the two mutations from the two organisms are in different genes. So they complement, not in the same gene, they're in different genes. So here you have, you're doing three crosses. Right? You're doing white one with white two, white one with white three, and white two with white three. And therefore, that gives you all the mating possibilities that you could do with these three mutants. And you can see here that these all result in different things. Some of them are white, and two of them are blue. So which mutations here complement, meaning that the mutations are in different genes? Well, let's go back up here to the rules and find out. If the mutations are wild type, which in this case is going to be blue, then the two mutations are in different genes. So, here we have this one, and here we have this one. So white one and three and white two and three complement. And usually, it's going to be you're going to see white three because that's the common factor. So white three complements twelve. It's mostly how you're going to see that. But if one is all white, if the mutations are all mutant, which in this case, in this problem is white, then the two mutations are in the same gene. And so this is not complement because they're in the same gene. These two are in different genes. So that's how you do a complementation test. You're definitely going to be asked about this. But just remember here, if the offspring have the wild type phenotype, they're in different genes, meaning that they complement. If their offspring are all mutant, they're in the same gene, means they don't complement. So with that, let's now move on.
Table of contents
- 1. Introduction to Genetics51m
- 2. Mendel's Laws of Inheritance3h 37m
- 3. Extensions to Mendelian Inheritance2h 41m
- 4. Genetic Mapping and Linkage2h 28m
- 5. Genetics of Bacteria and Viruses1h 21m
- 6. Chromosomal Variation1h 48m
- 7. DNA and Chromosome Structure56m
- 8. DNA Replication1h 10m
- 9. Mitosis and Meiosis1h 34m
- 10. Transcription1h 0m
- 11. Translation58m
- 12. Gene Regulation in Prokaryotes1h 19m
- 13. Gene Regulation in Eukaryotes44m
- 14. Genetic Control of Development44m
- 15. Genomes and Genomics1h 50m
- 16. Transposable Elements47m
- 17. Mutation, Repair, and Recombination1h 6m
- 18. Molecular Genetic Tools19m
- 19. Cancer Genetics29m
- 20. Quantitative Genetics1h 26m
- 21. Population Genetics50m
- 22. Evolutionary Genetics29m
3. Extensions to Mendelian Inheritance
Epistasis and Complementation
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Epistasis and Complementation practice set
