Molecular Biology and Evolution

Questions: 1. Can you clarify and describe the connection between evolution and the inheritance of genetic material.2. You book speaks of an experiment by Frederick Griffith. How did Griffiths experiment change the direction of molecular biology? Be specific and fully explain your answer. 3. Now let's move forward and think about the Medel experiments. Discuss the connection between Mendel's results and the process of meiosis. Answer: Variation in the genes allows some individuals of a particular species to adapt according to the changing environment. The natural selection depends directly on the phenotypes. The different phenotypic variation within a specific species is caused more by genetic variations. Some new genetic material can increase the ability of an organism to reproduce and survive. These particular genetic materials or alleles are carried to the next generation along with the phenotype properties. So, the inheritance of genetic material enables a species to survive despite of an adverse environment (Tamure et al., 2013). Frederic Griffith used two strains of Pneumococcus bacteria, one is the pathogenic strain (III-S) and the other is the non-pathogenic strain (II-R). He injected the two strains into two mice, respectively (Atzmon et on., 2010). He again injected two other mice with heat killed pathogenic strain and a mixture of heat killed pathogen and the non pathogenic strain. The mice that were injected with the pathogenic strain and the mixture of heat killed pathogen and non pathogenic strain died. The other two survived. The blood of the mouse, that was injected with mixture of heat killed pathogen and living non pathogen contained both III-S and II-R type bacteria. Griffith concluded that somehow the non pathogen had transformed to the pathogenic strain and he named it as The Transforming Process. This experiment further led to the various experiments of transferring the genetic materials (Tamure et al., 2013). The various genetic experiments performed by Mendel led to the understanding of independent assortment of the genes. The genes assort independently during the process of meiosis in a random combination in the gametes. In the meiosis process the two alleles of genes gets segregated from each other and they both have the same chance to be in the same gamete (Atzmon et on., 2010). References: Atzmon, G., Cho, M., Cawthon, R. M., Budagov, T., Katz, M., Yang, X., ... Wright, W. E. (2010). Evolution in health and medicine Sackler colloquium: Genetic variation in human telomerase is associated with telomere length in Ashkenazi centenarians.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,107, 1710-1717. Tamura, Koichiro, Glen Stecher, Daniel Peterson, Alan Filipski, and Sudhir Kumar. "MEGA6: molecular evolutionary genetics analysis version 6.0."Molecular biology and evolution(2013): mst197.