Making your person-in-a-bag:

    You will be making a person by creating their genotype for 10 characteristics, and then describing their phenotype for each genotype.  To do this, you will need to print out some sheets of paper, cut them up, and sort them into a bag.  I will first explain how to create your bag person, and then what to do with that person.

    Get the Microsoft Word document from BlackBoard (called chromosomes) that is ready for you to print out.  It is a 2 page document that looks like this:

It is basically a big chart, and all you have to do is print out these two pages and then cut on all the dotted lines.  The pieces of paper are your paper chromosomes.

    Once you have printed this out and cut it up, sort all of the paper chromosomes so that all the ones of the same letter (4 of each letter, for example, T, T, t, and t) are in a pile.  There is one set that doesn't work out-- you have 2 X chromosomes and one Y chromosome-- just put those three chromosomes together.

    Now it is time to have your bag ready-- you can use a paper lunch bag or a plastic sandwich bag, or anything, really.  Take one set of 4 chromosomes that all have the same letter and shuffle those 4 up so that you don't know which chromosome is which.  Randomly take 2 of the 4 chromosomes out and put them in your bag.  Repeat the procedure for all 9 sets of 4 chromosomes and for the one set of 3 chromosomes.  You have just finished making your person-in-a-bag!

What are all these paper chromosomes and what do we do with them?

    You have just defined a person with ten pairs of chromosomes:  9 pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes.  You may think of this bag as any somatic cell (non-sex cell) in a human.  Since humans normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes, this is a rather unusual individual. Each of the nine pairs of autosomes will show one of the genes which we studied in our last activity.  You will probably need to refer to the previous activity.  Use the table below to record the sex and genotypes/phenotypes of your "person".  For the sex genotype and phenotype, there are simply buttons for you to click.  For each of the autosomal genotypes and phenotypes, just write the 2-lettered-genotype at the left and the corresponding phenotype to its right.  (And save your bag person when done!)

© 2006 STCC Foundation Press, content by Dawn A. Tamarkin, Ph.D.

Last changed: January 21, 2007