We inherit our traits from our parents (personality traits, physical traits, polygenic traits and so on), and this is driven by the genetic material that is passed down from them. More specifically, we inherit half of our DNA—the genetic material that determines mostly how we appear on the outside—from our mother and the other half […]
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Nearly everything that we know today about heredity, genes, and the genetics of inheritance is thanks to the investigations of a Moravian scientist, Gregor Johann Mendel, who is often referred to as the father of modern genetics. His experiments with natural sciences and, in particular, thousands of pea plants, were conducted over the course of […]
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Half of your genetic blueprint that, in large, determines your visible outward characteristics is inherited from your mother and the other half is inherited from your father. This means that you inherit each gene twice, which, you guessed it, means that you have two copies of each gene. These two gene copies are also called […]
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You have probably wondered about your curly hair, the color of your eyes, the tone of your skin, your height and possibly even your body type and how they relate to your parents’ more than a fair share of times. There are some traits that your mother and father have that you do not have […]
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Think of autosomal recessive disorders as sneaky and secretive for now. However, in order to fully appreciate autosomal recessive disorders, the types, symptoms and diagnoses, let us first break down ‘autosomal recessive’ and go from there. Every one of us has a set of 23 chromosome pairs. Chromosomes 1-22 are called autosomes, while chromosome 23 […]
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Understanding nondisjunction and chromosomal anomalies require us to back up all the way and start at the beginning—the very beginning of it all, namely the beginning of life. Fertilization is the combination of a human egg and sperm in order to form what is known as a zygote or a fertilized egg. The fancy term […]
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What is a karyotype? What is a human karyotype? What is your karyotype? Just joking. But we all have a karyotype and all of this karyotype analysis will make sense by the end of this post. Every one of us has a set of 23 chromosome pairs. These chromosomes house all of the genes that make […]
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There are two kinds of genes: dominant and recessive gene. When it comes to which traits or characteristics of each individual will be visible on the outside as a result of those genes, the dominant ones will almost always prevail. I say almost, as there are specific situations in which traits of the recessive genes […]
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Almost everyone has heard of Gregor Mendel and his infamous pea plants. However, fear not if you have not—we’ve got you covered. However, when it comes to the chromosomal basis of inheritance, there were several individuals at play, in addition to Mendel. Though we tend to follow diagrams like Punnett square to predict genotypes of […]
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We always talk about our outward characteristics such as hair color, eye color, height, weight, and skin tone, as things that we have inherited from our parents or that we take after from some member of our family. However, very few of us actually know the process of how those unique characteristics that make us […]
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