Chapter 17, Problem 14TYK

Summary Introduction

To hypothesize:

The reason why the genetic effects of radiation are faster to observe in a moss than in the other plants. Also, to design an experiment to hypothesize that the effect of mutation decreases as the organism’s distance from the source of radiation increases.

Concept introduction:

Mosses are a spore producing non vascular plants. The haploid gametophyte stage is the dominant phase in the mosses. The cells produced in moss have half the number of chromosomes as the parent plant. Whereas, the diploid sporophyte stage is dominant in most of the plants in which the offsprings have a double set of chromosomes.

Mutations are the changes occurred in the sequence of the genome of an organism. Mutations can cause genetic or phenotypic changes in an organism.