Through his examination of the dihybrid cross in breeding of pea plants Mendel formulated from his observations a 9:3:3:1 ratio of phenotypic traits in the second filial generation. Thus he formulated the law of independent assortment which will be examined in this experiment. This law states that alleles for different genes separate independently during gamete formation (Reece et al., 2011).
The Drosophila Melanogaster is the organism used to study Mendel’s proposed patterns of inheritance because of its obvious advantages in that it is small and easy to contain and breed in a laboratory; it contains physical traits known as phenotypes that are easy to identify and it produces large numbers of offspring in a short amount of time (Turnpenny and Ellard, 2012).
The aim of this experiment if to test Mendel’s law of independent assortment though the dihybrid cross of cinnabar brown females (cn/cn;bw/bw) with wild type males (cn+/cn+;bw+bw+) where a 9:3:3:1 ratio is