Blog Post #7- Jenny

       The plant that we are experimenting with is called Brassica Oleracea. This plant stout herbaceous annual, biennial, to occasionally perennial. Generally, this plant has waxy, rounded leaves, and is usually grown in north temperate regions. This is because the plants need a cool growing season and lots of moisture to grow. This species originated from western and southern Europe. Some of these plants in these species are cabbage, broccoli, kale, cauliflower, and kohlrabi.

       These are some of the recent picture our plants. They are starting to wither and die because they are being overrun with weeds and other plants. We hope that they will survive though.
       To predict the kind of traits that our plants will have, we have to know what traits our own plant has. When A bee pollinates a plant, some of the pollen rubber off of the plant and onto the bee. Then the plant pollinates another plant and the pollen from the bee falls off and into the other plant. Suppose our plant has heterozygous purple stem genes. That would mean that it would have Ss ( I used random letters these are not actual results of an experiment. My data could be flawed). If the pollen from the first plant mixes with a homozygous recessive green stem plant, then it would have ss genes. When these two plants make offspring, the new plant would have different chances for traits. When you use a Punnet Square, you can predict what traits the offspring will have.
    You can predict that the offspring will have a 50% chance to have heterozygous purple stems, and a 50% chance that the offspring will have homozygous recessive green stems. There are only small chances that the offspring will look exactly like only one of the parent plants. This is because the offering is a mixture of both the parent's genes.
      (The blog won't let me upload a picture of wild Kohlrabi). Kohlrabi,  before it was used for food, looks different from the version the we eat today, because it has been changed by generations. The new Kohlrabi has been changed by generations of itself growing. Like I said before, offspring doesn't always look like their parents. This means that the new Kohlrabi would not look like the old Kohlrabi.