This is a blog for my Genetics class at Stockton College! Bits and pieces of genetics news and views will be posted here on a regular basis. Feel free to join in.
Most of us remember R. C. Punnett when we think about the (in)famous "Punnett Square" from high school biology. We probably used his technique to calculate gene and genotypic frequencies using examples of green and yellow peas (confusing Punnett with Mendel) or red- and white-eyed fruit flies or even attatched and un-attached human earlobes! Few people know that R.C. Punnett originally worked with chickens. His original paper, generally credited as the first application of the "Punnett Square", utilized feather color in chickens as a model!
Less known, is Punnett's work on duck feather patterns -- especially those genes that were expressed in down and had a sex-linked pattern of expression!
A founding member of the Journal of Genetics, Punnet is also credited with initiating the derivation of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium when he asked Hardy, a fellow cricket player, to solve a question regarding the distribution of phenotypes in populations.
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