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paganini paganini
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8 years ago
I know, that you use capital letters for dominant attributes and small letters for recessive letters. But the following questions appeared:

* for intermediate characteristics you always use capital letters I guess?
* More important: Pictures seem to differ by the set of letters used.
i.e. if you crossbreed a red flower and a white one, I normally see R and w used, thus the letter itself describes the colour, the allele. In other pictures showing the cross-breeding of animals, they use i.e. C and c for (fur)colour, where C stands for the dominant brown attribute and c stands for the rezessive white colour. Here, the letter itself is the first letter of the attribute colour, not the allele. For me, this has the advantage (especially in dihybride crossings), that you can control easily if you have written down the wright combination of letters like CcHh for colour and horns(legth), although you have to write down the meaning of each letter somewhere else.
* IF I use the second version instead, it comes to problems for intermediate crossings - if you cross C(brown here, but intermediate) and C(white here, also intermediate), you have to mark one of the C's to mark the difference - and have to make a list of the meanings again.

Summing up: letters sometimes seem to represent the allele, sometimes the attribute / characteristic - what is the right usage?
And how to handle the letters for intermediate crossings?

Thanks a lot, Markus
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Educator
8 years ago
Capitalizing the letter suggests that the allele is dominant, the opposite is true for lower capitals. For example, if the gene codes for a protein, and the protein has two alleles (B, b), you'd use those two letters.

In terms of intermediates, I don't know what you mean by that. If you could elaborate with an example, it'd help
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