Human Genetics: A Worldwide Search for the Dominant Trait

Fall 2006 Letters of Introduction, Photos & Final Reports

All classes participating in this project have been asked to submit a letter of introduction and final report to the project Discussion Area. In this report, students share what they have learned from doing the project. Here is selected portion of those letters and reports.

Letters of Introduction:

High School of Arts and Business in Corona, Queens

Radnoti Miklos Kiserleti Gimnazium in Hengary, Szeged (Europe)

Staley Middle School in Americus, Georgia, USA

Kherad Girls School in Tehran, Iran

Final Reports :

Radnoti Miklos Kiserleti Gimnazium, Szeged- "Riesz"

Sulphur High School in Sulphur, Louisiana, USA

Radnoti Miklos Kisereti Gimnazium, Szeged, Hungary, Europe

High School of Arts and Business in Corona, Queens, NYC, NY, USA

The High School of Arts and Business is located in Corona, Queens. The school is not too far from Queens Center Mall and Flushing Meadow Park. The community around the school is not bad. There are many cultures from Hispanics in Corona to Jewish and Russian citizens in Forest Hills. Arts and Business high school is located in Corona, Queens, near the Long Island Expressway. In our school we have really good and different types of programs. Our school is very famous for two special reasons, which makes us one of the most unique schools in New York City. First our school does not have any windows and it is shaped like a box.

There are a couple of teams and groups in the school. Some of the groups are the Photography Club and the Debate team. There are college courses that give credits to the students in them. We have a limited amount of sports due to the fact that we have no gymnasium or fields. The sports we have are baseball (boys) soccer (boys/girls), handball (boys/girls) and cross country track (boys/girls). We are also big in art. There are opportunities for kids in our school to get an internship or partnership with art programs outside of our school.

At the High School for Arts and Business we have a lot of ethnic groups. The most common group is Hispanic, but all different types of Latinos, not just one category. This school has at least 900 students. It’s a very small population since many schools have other 1000 students. The dress code in our school is simply no bandanas or beads or any inappropriate clothing showing too much skin. The dress code is put to prevent any violence, especially relating to gangs. We also are not allowed to bring any electronics such as cell phones, ipods or cameras.

The background history of our school was that before our school building was Arts and Business, it was a bowling alley. We think that’s the reason why we don’t have any windows located in the school. Our school also was called before The Newtown Annex. This was another building for The High School of Newtown. But then we gained our independence and became our own school.

The genetics questions which we would like to answer are:
1- How many people had 100% recessive for the traits surveyed? How common is it to see 100% recessive?
2- What percentage of individuals within the sample show at least one of these recessive traits?
3- How do males and females compare in the percentage of dominant traits?
4- From the families surveyed, what percent have heterozygous traits?
5- Within families, what is observed if both parents have dominant traits?
6- How do we know the probability of a woman bearing a female child?
7- What percentage of people surveyed have dominant traits and recessive traits?

Staley Middle School in Americus, Georgia, USA

We are really excited about participating in this genetics project. It is our first time so we expect to learn a lot.

We have two teams: The A-Day Brain Trust & the T-TH Lifers. Our names were chosen because of our block scheduling--A, B & C Days & we are learning Life Science this year.

Our school is in Americus, Georgia. In case you do not know where that is, it is about two hours south of Atlanta.
Americus is a small rural town and the home of Habitat for Humanity. President Jimmy Carter is our neighbor down the road in Plains, Ga.

Staley Middle School actually has a school within a school. All of us are part of the Academy, which is for the gifted and talented hehe and kids with high test scores. The other part of the school is for regular classes. They are the normal kids---we, obviously are the AB Normals hehe.

Our school has a lot of sports, football(maybe we should not mention this year)cheerleading, softball, basketball, cross country and track. All students can participate--even sixth graders. We also have many clubs, Odyssey of the Mind, Science Club, Future Cities, NEED, Beta Club, Academic Bowl and many others.

There is a lot of history with our school. It was the first school for African Americans in this area. Of course we have a different building now but it is still an old building. We are planning on doing a beautification project for the outside of the school. It is a bit run down but we are proud of it and want it to look nice.

Well, that is all for now!

Staley Middle School

Kherad Girls School in Tehran, Iran

Hi!
We live in Iran. The location of our country is 40.57 E and 35.33 N. The city we live in is Tehran which is the capital of Iran. Our school, Kherad, is A girls school. It has 3 buldings. They teach students from kindergarten to university, with 1034 students. We study in guidance school with 279 student. We work on Human genetics project in biology community. We want to communicate with other students. The population of this class is 20 person.
Hope to hear from some of you soon!

Radnoti Miklos Kiserleti Gimnazium in Hengary, Szeged (Europe)

Hi!
We go to Radnoti Miklos Kiserleti Gimnazium in Hengary, Szeged (Europe). Szeged is a middle-sized city. The population of it is around 200 000. The river Tisza divides it into two parts: Szeged and New Szeged. there are a lot of elementary and high schools and a University too. Around 50 000 people study in Szeged. The heart of the city is Karasz street (named after a fish), where you can find lots of glamorous shops. If you have free time and want to enjoy yourself, you can go to the theater, to the museum or to the cinema. The Szeged Plaza can be the paradise of window shoppers.
Our school is near the river Tisza. The school has a prestige in the country, because of its high level education and its talent students. The school has been working since 1893. The members of the team likes to play basketball, listen to music, read and ice skating. We started this project, because we would like to find out the secrets of human genetics. We are 9th graders, and we are proud to be the students of this school.

Final Reports

Radnoti Miklos Kiserleti Gimnazium, Szeged- "Riesz"

Hello!

We feel lucky that we could take part in this project. It was instructive, because we had the possibility to learn about the rules of heredity, calculating (statistical) dispersion and we could face some of the difficulties of gathering data. We did not have high expectations, because this was the first survey we had taken part in, so we hadn’t been able to make a comparison. Our only purpose was to get experience and it was achieved.
We surveyed how frequent certain characteristics were among the members of our group and among other students in our school, and then we compared our findings with those surveyed by other groups in our school.
We used computers and calculators to do this work; and of course our mind.
We think the project was very good, and we think it need not to be changed in the future.

Thanks for everything:
The team

See Word document of our Final Report

Sulphur High School in Sulphur, Louisiana, USA

The Advanced Biology students of Sulphur High School lead by Georgia Broussard have devised this final report.

We were able to complete the project as it was designed. The steps provided made it easy to do this project efficiently. We were not familiar with some of the traits we surveyed. It was fun learning about them and surveying students in our school. If we had a chance to do the project again we would expand the survey to include people in our community as well. We were surprised by the outcome. We expected to see a higher percentage of dominant traits. In order to analyze the large quantity of data our teacher placed us in groups by traits and we used our calculators. We used our interactive whiteboard in class to display our calculations. We determined there is no relationship between how often a trait occurs and dominance. The dominant trait prevailed in only two of the six traits surveyed.

Radnoti Miklos Kisereti Gimnazium, Szeged, Hungary, Europe

The total number of individuals surveyed in the seven traits:

Ear Lobes: 4189
White Forelocks: 4096
Dimples: 4274
Thumb: 4163
Pinky: 4207
Mid-Digit Hair: 4079
Red-Green Colorblindness: 2621

The occurrence of dominant and recessive traits (in the whole population):

	Ear Lobes		White Forelocks		Dimples		Thumb		Pinky		Mid-Digit Hair		Red-Green colorblindness
Total	4189		4096		4274		4163		4207		4079		2621
(D=dominant, R=recessive)	D	R	D	R	D	R	D	R	D	R	D	R	D	R
No. of students surveyed	2725	1464	616	3489	1765	2509	1845	2348	2239	1968	1692	2387	2527	94
Percentages	65%	35%	15%	85%	41%	59%	44%	56%	53%	47%	41,5%	58,5%	96,5%	3,5%
Allele rate	40,9%	59,1%	7,8%	92,2%	23,4%	76,6%	24,9%	75,1%	31,6%	68,4%	23,5%	76,5%	81,1%	18,9%

The following graphs show the percentages of traits and alleles (in the whole population).

2587 of 4314, 60% of the students have each of the phenotypes surveyed.

Genotypes showing the dominant trait: Dominant homozygote, Heterozygote

Genotypes showing the recessive trait: Recessive homozygote

The dominant traits aren’t the most common in a population, except Ear Lobes, Pinky and Red-Green Colorblindness.

The dominant alleles are the most common only in the Red-Green Colorblindness.

A recessive trait should be more common in a population if the fitness of individuals bearing the recessive allele is better due to the actual range of certain environmental parameters.

We were able to complete this project. We didn’t think at the beginning that we will be successful, but later it proved to be much easier than we thought.

The most important scientific procedure we learnt was the averaging and how to calculate the rate of genotypes from the rate of phenotypes.

We thought that the dominant traits will be the most common, but we were wrong because the dominant trait was more frequent only in three cases and the dominant allele was more common only in the Red-Green Colorblindness.

The frequency rate of the dominant traits:

	Ear Lobes	White Forelocks	Dimples	Thumb	Pinky	Mid-Digit Hair	Red-Green colorblindness
Highest	88,46%	49,72%	74,07%	77,78%	76,19%	100,00%	100,00%
Lowest	12,50%	0,00%	20,00%	8,70%	25,71%	14,29%	84,21%
Frequency range	75,96%	75,96%	49,72%	54,07%	69,08%	49,27%	85,71%

In this population there’s no direct relationship between the trait occurrence and dominance. The explanation should be similar as in the case of an earlier question (a recessive trait should be more common in a population if the fitness of individuals bearing the recessive allele is better due to the actual range of certain environmental parameters).