Final Report

Dear International Students,

The following is our final report for Spring 2000 from the Academy of St. Elizabeth. Our class was able to complete the project as it was designed. It was fairly easy and we did not experience any problems. It would have been easier to observe trends however, had we not been gender swayed being in an all girls’ school. The scientific procedures that we learned were collecting, recording and analyzing data. The outcome of this project was very good. Many schools from across the globe joined together in the search of the dominant gene and all were able to interact with each other and give in the information needed. If we had a chance to do this project over again, we would survey many more people, since our area is inclusive of mostly women. The project met our expectations. We were surprised when we found only one male with the red-green color blindness trait out of all our family members tested. This showed that this trait is sex linked and appears on the X chromosome. The procedures that we used to get our data was that first we collected data from our class, and our classmate’s families. Then we asked the rest of the biology classes for their information and asked them to interview their families. We then combined all that information to one big piece of data and submitted it to the project website. The frequency range of earlobes is 34.3%. For white forelock it is 60%. It is 20% for dimples, thumb, and mid digit hair. The frequency range for the pinky was 34.3% and for red-green color blindness was 98.5%. While there is sometimes a relationship between how often a trait occurred and that trait’s dominance, in this instance, it was not always the case. Several times, a recessive trait was found more frequently than a dominant one. We learned that red-green color blindness predominantly occurs in males.