Question

Your friend says that a pea plant with purple flowers must have FF alleles for the flower color gene. Do you agree or disagree? Why?

make it sound like a 7th grader

Answer 1

I disagree.

Here’s why (simple 7th-grade words):

- The purple allele (F) is dominant. That means one F is enough to make the flower purple.
- So a purple plant can be FF (two purple alleles) or Ff (one purple, one white).
- A plant is white only if it has ff (two white alleles), because white is recessive.

Quick example:
- If two Ff plants mate, their babies can be FF, Ff, or ff. That means some babies could be white even if both parents are purple.

If you want to know for sure whether a purple plant is FF or Ff, you can do a test cross: breed it with an ff (white) plant. If any offspring are white, the purple parent must be Ff. If all offspring are purple, the parent is probably FF.