NAME: _____________________________________

STUDENT ID #: ______________________________

MCB 140 1st Midterm

Spring 2007
NAME (Please print):__________________________________________
STUDENT ID #:_______________________________________________
REMINDERS
1. You have 50 minutes for the 150 point exam. Exams will be collected at noon
sharp.
2. Print your name and ID# on each page of the exam. You will lose points if you
forget to do this.
3. There are 7 pages total, including this cover page. All pages must be turned in.
4. Only the front of each page will be graded. If you use the back of a page,
transcribe your answer to the space provided on the front of the page.
The exam is short but the questions are content-laden, i.e., well-thought-out
answers are expected (note: this does not mean verbose just thoughtful).
Think before you start writing about the best way to express the point you
wish to make.
Personal note from Prof. Urnov: I will grade my portion of the exam myself, and
would be grateful for somewhat more lucid prose and intelligible handwriting than
one sometimes finds on midterms. fdu
----------------------------------------(Do not write below this line)----------------------------------------

2 (30) _____
4 (30) _____
5 (30) _____
6 (30) _____
7 (30) _____
TOTAL _____ / 150
Page 1 of 7

NAME: _____________________________________
STUDENT ID #: ______________________________
Question 1 (30 points)
Shortly after the formal founding of the City of Berkeley, on April 1, 1878, you arrive there to
study some botany. Interested in the problem of inheritance, you come across a paper in an
obscure journal by a certain Gregor Johann Mendel. The sweet pea seems too mundane for
you, so you pick the California poppy its bright orange flowers decorate many a hillside in
Berkeley. After much searching, however, you realize that all the poppies you can find are
orange! Undeterred, you pick it as your model system.
Starting with a wild-type (i.e., available on the hillside) population of uniformly orange-colored
California poppies, describe the experimental sequence you would undertake to determine, if
petal color inheritance in this plant follows Mendels First Law *. Your answer must take the
form of a numbered list for each action (1. do this and that), where appropriate, please
provide a justification ( so as to make sure that that and this happens).

Herman Muller invented the use of mutagens to induce mutations in the 1920s. You are not ahead of your time in
that respect. All you have access to are some flowers from a hillside, a patch of land, the Sun, a microscope, and
maybe some forceps, brushes, etc.

Page 2 of 7

NAME: _____________________________________
STUDENT ID #: ______________________________
Question 2 (30 points)
A series of experiments by Thomas Hunt Morgan, and his student, Calvin Bridges, on eye color
inheritance in Drosophila provided strong experimental evidence that Mendels particles of
inheritance the genes lie on chromosomes. A summary of crosses performed by Morgan is
shown below, and two questions about these experiments are on the next page.

See questions on next page, please.

Page 3 of 7

NAME: _____________________________________
STUDENT ID #: ______________________________
Morgan himself wrote the following: [if my interpretation of the data is correct, and the
gene for white is on the X chromosome], there should be two classes of females in the F2
generation, namely
What two classes of females is Morgan referring to? (5 points)

Describe, using modern genetic notation, the experiment Morgan did to confirm this specific
hypothesis, and his data. (10 points)

In apparent contradiction to his mentors data on criss-cross inheritance of eye color in

Drosophila, Calvin Bridges found a rare white-eyed daughter offspring from a mating between a
white-eyed mother and a red-eyed father. He correctly interpreted this finding as evidence of
nondisjunction in meiosis to yield an exceptional XXY female. Describe, in narrative form, the
two distinct forms of evidence Bridges provided in support of this hypothesis.
You do NOT have to describe every cross he did you are being graded on your ability to able
to describe in a general sense, and in a clear sentence or two, Bridgess overall experimental
approach to the problem (15 points).
Line of evidence #1

Line of evidence #2

Page 4 of 7

NAME: _____________________________________
STUDENT ID #: ______________________________
Question 3 (30 points)
Alfred Sturtevants name is rightly inscribed in the history of genetics for his drafting of the first
ever genetic map. His famous paper describing the data is entitled The Linear Arrangement of
Six Sex-Linked Factors in Drosophila, as Shown By Their Mode of Association.
Linear thats a strong word. Think about this for a couple of minutes and write a few wellworded sentences describing, in general terms, what evidence Sturtevant provided in support of
the fact that genes are arranged in linear (as opposed to some other) order. Yes, hes right, genes
lie on chromosomes, and a chromosome is a linear piece of DNA but that wasnt discovered
until ~1953. How did Sturtevant convince the reviewers that genes are in linear order? (20
points)

The garden pea, Pisum sativum, has a diploid karyotype of 14, i.e., has only 7 linkage groups. In
his study of dihybrid crosses, Mendel, therefore was very likely to have picked two linked loci.
In fact, for some of his two-factor crosses, he DID pick two linked loci which, nonetheless,
yielded a perfect 9:3:3:1 ratio in a AaBb self-cross. How can this be? (10 points)

Page 5 of 7

NAME: _____________________________________
STUDENT ID #: ______________________________
Question 4 (10 points)
A and B are yeast genes immediately next to each other on chromosome II, close to the
telomerethat is, they are separated by a distance of 0 cM and far from the chromosome II
centromere. Consider a cross between two haploid yeast strains, one A/b and one a/B. What
proportion of parental ditypes, nonparental ditypes, and tetratypes do you expect?

Question 5 (20 points)

George Beadle and Edward Tatum mutagenized Neurospora strains and identified a haploid
which harbored a single mutation making its growth dependent on vitamin B6. You get
interested in this finding and repeat the experiment. Surprisingly, you identify a second haploid
strain with an identical phenotype to that of Beadle and Tatums mutant. Your new Neurospora
strain will not grow without vitamin B6; it accumulates the same chemical precursors to B6 as
Beadle and Tatums did; and a cross between your mutant and a wild-type strain indicates that a
single locus is responsible for the phenotype in your strain.
You cross your strain to Beadle and Tatums original mutant (still available from the Stanford
freezers), to form a diploid. You induce the diploid to undergo meiosis but, rather than bothering
with octad analysis, you simply collect and grow 100 random haploid progeny. All are viable on
rich media. You test the progeny for growth on media lacking B6 and find that 75 cannot grow
under these conditions, accumulating the B6 precursors; the other 25 progeny can grow without
B6. What do you conclude about your new mutant and about the enzyme controlling this step in
B6 synthesis?

Page 6 of 7

NAME: _____________________________________
STUDENT ID #: ______________________________
Question 6 (30 points)
The schematic on the right describes
a passage from your book on
experimentally distinguishing
between two modes of inheritance
for coat color in mice.
In general terms, what set of
circumstances could impel a
geneticist to begin considering the
segregation of differences at more
than one locus as underlying the
inheritance of the trait under study?
(10 points)

The example above offers the following rule-of-thumb to distinguish between two possible
modes of inheritance: if the F2 albino mouse crossed to a pure-breeding brown mouse yields
only black mice, then its a single locus with incomplete dominance; if some F2 albino mice
yield only black mice in that cross, but other F2 albino mice yield a 50:50 black:brown split, and
yet other F2 albino mice yield only brown mice then were dealing with two loci and a
recessive epistatic relationship between them. Wait a minute says a doubting Thomas in the
audience about your last set of data What if its not epistasis at all, but simply environmentdependent incomplete penetrance, you know, like coat color in Siamese cats their fur color is a
function of the temperature theyre grown at! Fair enough, you say.
For the example above, describe two distinct experimental approaches that would directly
address the issue of whether or not one is dealing with temperature-of-environment-dependent
incomplete penetrance, or true epistasis? (20 points)
Approach 1

Approach 2

Page 7 of 7