Question

In cattle, consider that the lack of horns is dominant to the presence of horns. A bull without horns is crossed with a horned cow. Of four offspring, one is horned and the other three lack horns. The bull is

Answer 1

Heterozygous

Step-by-step explanation:

• A dominant trait is the one that expresses itself over the recessive trait, therefore for a recessive trait to express itself, an organism must have both the alleles as recessive for a given genotype.
• In the question, it is given that the lack of horns is dominant over presence hf horns.
• If we symbolize lack of horns as H and presence of horns as h,then :
• the genotype of the bull without horns needs to be determined
• the horned cow must be hh as this is a recessive trait
• it is given that out of four offspring one is horned, this means that this horned offspring must be hh and since the offspring inherits one allele each from the parents, one h must be coming from the cow and the other h from the bull and hence, we can conclude that the bull must be Hh i.e heterozygous .