Organisms and Number of Chromosomes

Project #1361 on iSENSEProject.org

In this project, students will look at data for organisms in the domain Eukaryotes. Specifically, they are looking at the number of chromosomes in the plant, animal, fungus, and protist kingdoms.

Presently, one of the standards for Grade 8 Life Science is for students to recognize that hereditary information is contained in genes located in the chromosomes of each cell. A human cell contains about 30,000 different genes on 23 different chromosome pairs, or 46 chromosomes. This data can provide comparative information that may allow students to generate questions about the kingdom to which an organism belongs, its complexity and its genetic makeup.

Guiding Questions:

1. Which kingdom appears to have the greatest mean average number of chromosomes? If you eliminate the kingdom "protist" from the "Group by" sort, does your graph change? How?

2. Using different "Analysis Types" in the bar graph, do you think that the average number of chromosomes is related to the complexity of the organism? Can you explain your reasoning?

3. When using the bar graph and sorting by "Row Count", would you revise your answer to number 2 if there was an equal number of organisms from each kingdom? Why or why not?

Sources:

http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/genetics/medgen/chromo/species.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_by-chromosome_count (data may not be reliable)