Question

Differentiate between monohybrid cross and reciprocal cross.

Answer 1

Feature	Monohybrid Cross	Reciprocal Cross
Definition	A cross between parents differing in a single pair of contrasting characters.	A cross where the same two parents are used in two different experiments, with their sexes reversed in the second cross.
Parental role	Either parent differing in a single character pair may be used as male or female.	The same parents are used, but in one experiment parent A is female and B is male; in the reciprocal experiment, A is male and B is female.
Purpose	To study inheritance of a single trait.	To study the inheritance pattern to check if the trait transmission is influenced by the sex of the parent (sex linkage or maternal/paternal effects).
Example scenario	Cross between two pea plants differing only in seed color.	Cross between a homozygous recessive individual and a homozygous dominant individual, done twice with parents sexes switched.