The textbook for this course is Concepts of Genetics, 5th Edition, by William S. Klug and Michael R. Cummings, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997. The publisher also maintains a set of web pages for the textbook at http://www.prenhall.com/klug.
The errors that are listed on this page were identified during the 1997 class. If you find additional errors in the textbook or in the publisher's web pages that you feel should be added to the list, please email me at Richard.Ham@colorado.edu.
Page 86, middle of second column: A statement is made that the white locus in Drosophila in 1912, despite the description on pages 100-101 of the use of the white locus by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1910 to demonstrate sex linkage. In addition, a literature reference to Morgan's original 1910 paper is included in the list of selected readings on page 114. Thus, the 1912 date on page 86 is obviously in error.
Page 311, Figure 11.13; Page 312, Figure 11.14; Page 314 , Figure 11.15. All three of these figures present misleading diagrams of DNA synthesis that fail to take into account its bidirectional nature. In each case, synthesis of the leading strand appears to have started at the fork at the extreme left of the replication bubble and moved to the right along one of the template strands while lagging strand synthesis is occurring in a series of Okazaki fragments on the other template strand. In real life the synthesis is fully bidirectional, with a leading strand growing in a 5' to 3' direction away from the origin of replication toward each of the replication forks, and with Okazaki fragments growing 5' to 3' toward the origin of replication to fill in the gaps created by the inability of the polymerases to move in a 3' to 5' direction. The figures as shown only depict half of the replication process, and should not show a forking of the original DNA at the left. Instead, the left sides of the figures should be completely open, showing that the DNA at the origin of replication has already duplicated, and implying the existence of a complementary process of synthesis proceeding in the opposite direction beyond the edge of the figure.
Page 417, Figure 15.14. The figure shows a piece of DNA being cut out of the plasmid vector with a restriction enzyme prior to ligating in the DNA segment that is being cloned. This is an inaccurate portrayal of what actually happens. Normally, the vector contains only one cut site for the restriction endonuclease. Cutting the circular vector opens the circle, converting it to a linear molecule with sticky ends, without any loss of vector DNA. This allows an intact vector to be restored by ligation. When a cloned DNA insert is added, it increases the size of the circle, normally with no loss of vector DNA.
Page 443, Figure 15.21. The legend states that 8 coding segments encompass all possible combinations for the protein fragment. However, if one multiples the number of alternative codons for the six amino acids at the top of the figure, the result is 1x2x1x2x2x4 = 32 possible coding sequences. It is also clearly evident from looking at the sequences that are cited that many are missing.
Page 447, first new paragraph, line 4. "three fragments of 0.4, 0.8, and 6.2 kb" should be "three fragments of 0.4, 0.8, and 5.8 kb". The 6.2 kb fragment is cut by Sal I into fragments of 0.4 and 5.8 kb. Thus, there is no 6.2 kb fragment in model 1, which is correctly depicted in Figure 15.25 on page 446.
Page 450, Figure 15.27. The legend states that the sequence TTAACCCGG can be read, starting at the bottom of the gel. However, the photograph of the gel was cropped too closely before insertion into the book, such that the first four nucleotides of that sequence are below the bottom of the picture. The sequence that can be read is CCCGGCACGG, with some ambiguity as to whether the last C is a doublet. Also, the bands on the gel are not as sharply defined as on most high quality sequencing gels.
Page 674, Figure 24.17. The values for coefficient of inbreeding (F) that are presented for first and second cousin marriages are correct. However, these are not the probabilities of the children of those marriages being homozygous for the recessive allele a. Those frequencies are only 1/4 of the F values because only 1/4 of the children of heterozygous carrier parents will be homozygous recessive. The correct aa values are 1/64 for the child of a first cousin marriage and 1/256 for the child of a second cousin marriage. See lecture 39 notes for more details.