Question

1. In cats, long hair is recessive to short hair. A true-breeding (homozygous) short-haired male is mated to a long-haired female. What will their kittens look like?

Answer 1

long haired female is homozygous or heterozygous?
if female is homozygous,then all the kittens will be long haired
if female is heterozygous,then the kittens will be 50% is short haired, 50% long haired

Answer 2

Answer: The kittens will all have short hair but will have a heterozygous genotype (Ll)

Step-by-step explanation:

Since long hair is recessive we can denote the following genotypes: ll

Short hair is dominant we can denote the following genotypes: LL

The female kitten has long hair and therefore carries the recessive trait (ll) while the male carries the dominant trait for short hair and is homozygous meaning his genotype is LL

When doing a punnet square, all offspring will have the genotype Ll. This means they will all have short hair and have a heterozygous genotype.

Although the kittens will carry the recessive allele for long hair, this will still not be expressed because it is masked by the dominant short hair allele.