Single Gene Inheritance Essay Examples

The chapter on single gene inheritance offers a sound understanding of single gene diseases and conditions in human. The chapter discusses the ways in which geneticists identify the genes involved in development in order to understand the biological property. It expounds on the popular approach; gene discovery. There are disease which are caused by single gene mutations, and they often run across the family lineage. The pedigree of big families with several affected people may be used to evaluate if a disease-related gene is located on a sex chromosome or autosome and to determine if the associated disease phenotype is recessive or dominant.
As indicated in the chapter, autosomal recessive single gene conditions or diseases emerge only in people who have two mutant alleles of a gene which is associated with the disease. This implies that an individual inherits a single allele from his or her father and the other allele from his or her mother. Therefore people with autosomal recessive single gene disease or condition inherits single mutant allele from each parent. On the other hand, single dominant single gene conditions or disease take place amongst people who have only one mutant copy of the gene which is associated with the disease. This implies that the presence of one on-mutant or rather a wild type gene copy is not substantially sufficient to avert the risk of acquiring the disease.
The other concept I learnt from the chapter is the concept of chromosome pairing and separation. The two mechanism used are mitosis and meiosis, which are regulated by cell division cycle. With meiosis occurring in animals, the only changes in the genetic makeup which are evident with the germ cells; (the ovum and the sperm) are as a result of genetic material exchange which take place in the course of recombination.