Heredity
Chp 3 Sec 3
1903 Walter Sutton, an American geneticist, studied the grasshopper sex cells.
He found that the grasshopper sex cells had only 12 chromosomes.
The rest of the grasshopper’s cells had 24 chromosomes.
During fertilization half of the chromosomes came from the female and half came from the male.
Chromosome Theory of Inheritance
Genes are carried from the parents to their offspring on chromosomes.
During meiosis the chromosome pairs separate and are distributed to two different cells. The resulting sex cells have only half as many chromosomes as the other cells in the organism.
Chromosomes are made up of many genes joined together like beads on a string.