Mendelian Pigs
The Spring 2011 beta version of the Mendelian Pigs lab includes three exercises that introduce basic Mendelian genetics and population genetics, followed by a more open-ended population genetics exercise. Coat color variation in pigs, which is determined by a single locus, is the lab's focal story and experimental system. Students are asked and must respond to questions as they work through this lab, which is deployed in our new SimUText system. In most cases, students receive instant feedback to the answers they submit, and the questions are auto-graded so you can see which questions they found more or less challenging.
The lab should take students between 1.5-2 hours to complete, with a 10 minute pre- and post-test at the beginning and end.
A description of each exercise is below, but you can take a look at the current version of the lab for yourself by following these steps:
1. Download SimUText
Download the application appropriate for your operating system:
Download SImUText for Windows Download SImUText for Mac
2. Install the application
Follow the installation instructions for your operating system:
Windows
Internet Explorer
- Choose "Run" and the installer will start when the download is complete.
Oher browsers
- When the download finishes, you should see a file in your browser's Downloads window called SimUText_Win_Setup.msi. Double-click it to run the installer wizard.
- Vista users must have Administrator access to install the program.
Mac
- When the download finishes, you should see a file in your browser's Downloads window called SimUText_Mac_Installer.dmg.
- Double-click it to mount the Disk Image.
- In the Finder window that opens, drag the SimUText folder onto the Applications folder alias to install it in the main Applications folder. Or you may drag the SimUText folder anywhere you want on your computer.
- Eject the Disk Image like any other drive.
- Open the SimUText folder and double-click on the SimUText application to run it.
- For easy access, when you have launched SimUText, you may CTL-Click its dock icon and choose "Keep in Dock."
3. Launch and log in
When SimUText launches, use the following login information:
login: mendel@sales.simbio.com
password: mendel
If you would like to use the Mendelian Pigs lab this spring as part of our NSF-funded research study, please fill out the form on our study webpage or just email the study coordinator Joel Abraham directly.
Description of the Mendelian Pigs lab
The lab is divided into three exercises as follows:
Breed Your Bacon
Students use artificial selection to produce two pure-breeding populations of pigs with different coat colors and then a virtual Mate-o-Matic™ tool to conduct crosses and deduce the relationships between those alleles.
Pigmented Pigs
Additional alleles are introduced to the population, and students are given background information on the molecular biology of coat color. Using that information, they predict which alleles will be dominant over which other ones and test their predictions.
Going Hog Wild
The final exercise focuses on differences in coat colors between domestic and wild pigs. Students design and carry out experiments on how the speed of change in coat color due to selection might relate to the dominance relationships between the different coat color alleles.