Coin Sex Lab

As weird as it sounds, we completed a coin sex lab this past week in biology. We modeled how genes and alleles randomly mix by using coins. The coins were flipped and whichever side they landed on determined what alleles were used. The coins being flipped represented the process of meiosis and writing the results down represented the process of reproduction. We expected to have one of each monohybrid or dihybrid cross because that was the most logical, but instead we usually got the genotype and phenotype of the most probable result. During meiosis, chromosomes can recombine, which is when chromosomes may exchange information. Homozygous alleles are alleles that are both either dominant or recessive, whereas heterozygous alleles are a pair of one dominant allele and one recessive. Probability and prediction are what helped us ´predict´ our results, though not all of them were right. We learned that autosomal inheritance is related to all of the chromosomes, whereas x-linked inheritance is only linked to the sex chromosome X which is why x-linked inheritances are mostly common in males. They only need one recessive allele to have the inheritance whereas females need two.