Question

In clover plants, the pattern on the leaves is determined by asingle gene with multiple alleles that are related in a dominanceseries. 7 different alleles of the gene are known; an allelethat determines the absence of a pattern is recessive to the other6 alleles, eah of which produces a different pattern. Allheterozygous combinations of alleles show complete dominance.
A. How many different kinds of leaf patterns (includingthe absence of a pattern) are possible in a population of cloverplants in which all seven alleles are represented?
B. What is the largest number of different genotypesthat could be associated with any one phenotype? Is there anyphenotype that could be represented by only a singlegenotype?

Answer 1

Answer:

Both answers are 7.

Explanation:

In the given example it is stated that the multiple alleles are related in a dominance series which means that there is a hierarchy for dominance between the alleles and this will affect the phenotype.

For A, since there are 7 different alleles and one is always going to be dominant if the combination are different so the number of different kinds of leaf patterns are limited to the number of distinct alleles which in this case is 7. There are 7 kinds of leaf patterns possible.

For B, since one of the alleles is always dominant to all the others, there are 7 different genotypes that could be associated with one phenotype such as G1G2, G1G3, G1G4 etc.

I hope this answer helps.