Question

In tomatoes, the texture of the skin may be smooth or fuzzy. The Ponderosa variety has fruits with smooth texture. The Red Peach variety has fruits with fuzzy texture. Crosses between the two plants produced all smooth fruits. Crosses between these smooth-fruited F1 plants produced 174 fuzzy-textured fruits and 520 smooth-textured fruits. Describe how these skin textures are inherited.

Answer 1

The skin texture in tomatoes follows a dominant-recessive pattern, with smooth texture being dominant. This is evident from the F1 generation being all smooth-skinned, and the F2 generation displaying a close to 3:1 ratio of smooth to fuzzy textures.

Step-by-step explanation:

The inheritance of skin texture in tomatoes, as described in the question, follows a dominant-recessive pattern. The Ponderosa variety, with smooth-textured skin, and the Red Peach variety, with fuzzy-textured skin, are crossed, resulting in all smooth fruits, which indicates that the smooth texture trait is dominant. The F1 plants that are crossed to produce an F2 generation with both smooth and fuzzy fruits, in a ratio closer to 3:1, show that the smooth texture trait is inherited as the dominant trait while the fuzzy texture is the recessive trait. This is similar to Mendel's laws of inheritance, where the dominant trait masks the expression of the recessive trait in the F1 generation, but both traits can appear in the F2 generation according to predictable ratios.