Genetics and Heredity Jeopardy

Mendel, Punnett squares, DNA, and inheritance patterns on one free genetics board for high school biology. Play it on a projector with phone buzzers.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

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Every clue on this board

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Mendel's Peas

$200
In pea crosses, this term describes the trait that showed up in every first-generation offspring.
What is dominant?
$400
In pea crosses, this term describes the trait that vanished in the first generation and reappeared in the second.
What is recessive?
$600
Crossing two plants heterozygous for one trait gives offspring phenotypes in this ratio.
What is 3 to 1?
$800
This law states that the two alleles for a trait separate from each other when gametes form.
What is the law of segregation?
$1,000
This law of heredity explains why seed shape and seed color were inherited without affecting each other.
What is the law of independent assortment?

Genetic Vocabulary

$200
Different versions of the same gene, such as B and b, are called these.
What are alleles?
$400
An organism's genetic makeup for a trait, such as Bb, is called this.
What is genotype?
$600
An organism's observable characteristics, such as purple flowers, make up this.
What is phenotype?
$800
An organism with two identical alleles for a trait, such as BB or bb, is described with this term.
What is homozygous?
$1,000
This term names the specific position of a gene on a chromosome.
What is a locus?

Punnett Squares

$200
Crossing a BB parent with a bb parent gives this percentage of heterozygous offspring.
What is 100 percent?
$400
Crossing Bb with bb, this percentage of offspring are expected to show the recessive trait.
What is 50 percent?
$600
Crossing two Bb parents, this fraction of offspring are expected to be homozygous recessive.
What is one-fourth?
$800
A dihybrid cross between two parents heterozygous for both traits gives this classic phenotypic ratio.
What is 9:3:3:1?
$1,000
Crossing an organism showing the dominant trait with a homozygous recessive one, to reveal its unknown genotype, is this.
What is a test cross?

DNA Structure

$200
Watson and Crick described DNA in 1953 as having this twisted-ladder shape.
What is a double helix?
$400
In DNA, adenine always pairs with this base.
What is thymine?
$600
This X-ray crystallographer's image known as Photo 51 provided key evidence of DNA's structure.
Who is Rosalind Franklin?
$800
Each DNA nucleotide contains a phosphate group, a nitrogenous base, and this five-carbon sugar.
What is deoxyribose?
$1,000
Guanine and cytosine are held together by this many hydrogen bonds.
What is three?

Beyond Mendel

$200
When a red snapdragon crossed with a white one gives pink offspring, this pattern is at work.
What is incomplete dominance?
$400
Roan cattle, with a coat of both red hairs and white hairs, show this pattern in which both alleles are fully expressed.
What is codominance?
$600
Traits like human height and skin color, controlled by many genes, show this kind of inheritance.
What is polygenic inheritance?
$800
Red-green color blindness is far more common in males because it follows this inheritance pattern.
What is X-linked inheritance?
$1,000
When one gene masks the effect of a different gene, as in Labrador retriever coat color, it is called this.
What is epistasis?

Mutations and Disorders

$200
Down syndrome is usually caused by an extra copy of this chromosome.
What is chromosome 21?
$400
In this recessive disorder, red blood cells can take on a curved, rigid shape that blocks blood vessels.
What is sickle cell disease?
$600
The failure of chromosomes to separate properly during meiosis is called this.
What is nondisjunction?
$800
Inserting or deleting a number of bases that is not a multiple of three causes this type of mutation.
What is a frameshift mutation?
$1,000
This inherited disorder, caused by a dominant allele on chromosome 4, usually first appears in middle age.
What is Huntington's disease?

Final Jeopardy — Father of Genetics

This Augustinian friar's experiments crossing thousands of pea plants, published in 1866, laid the foundation of modern genetics.

Who is Gregor Mendel?

How to run this board

The board runs from Mendel's pea experiments and the vocabulary of alleles, genotypes, and phenotypes through Punnett squares, DNA structure and replication, non-Mendelian inheritance such as codominance and sex linkage, and mutations and genetic disorders.

The Punnett Squares column needs a moment of work, so give teams 20 seconds and scratch paper before opening the buzzers on those clues. Otherwise the fastest mental arithmetic wins instead of the soundest reasoning.

After the game, turn any clue the whole class missed into a warm-up problem for the next day.

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