Remember: While working
from home is a joyous thing, the officially supported locations
for MCB181L computer assignments are the BLC (Koffler 209), the
Science Library, and the Information Commons of the Main Library.
Learning how to operate Watch the walk-through
movie. There have been minor changes
to the interface and assignments, but the key aspects are all the
same.
A Key
Assumption in Pedigree work Given than one is generally concerned with rare genetic
diseases, a reasonable (and necessary, for these exercises)
assumption is that 'outsiders' (non-parental units mating
into the pedigree) are homozygous for wild-type alleles.
Cheats
& Learning Aids When not in Homework mode, some of the pedigrees have
an 'autosolve' feature enabled. These can be chosen by watching
for the term 'Autosolve' in the title. If you set up the checkboxes
as shown and select an inheritance model, the computer will
walk through its deductions about each individual. Note that
'autosolve' only shows you viable models; it cannot display
an inheritance model that is inconsistent with the pedigree.
The
assignment (getting credit)
To receive credit, you need to select the 'Homework' option
from the first menu within the program (when this is done, a label "For
credit: XXXXX", where XXXX is your UAnetID, should appear).
You will then need to either 1) assign logical, consistent genotypes
to every individual, or 2) identify a family where the child's (logically
deduced) genotype cannot have arisen from a mating of its parents
(with their logically deduced genotypes). You will need to examine
your assigned pedigree from the viewpoint of each of 3 inheritance
models (autosomal recessive, etc.). Ruling a model in or out is done
via the Set Mode tab.
Completion
of the assignment = you have assigned each of the 3 inheritance
models (autosomal recessive, autosomal dominant, sex-linked recessive)
as 'Plausible' or 'Ruled
Out'. An example is shown below; your results may differ
depending on the pedigree that is selected for you.
