GENES

Making you the person you are

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z What is D.N.A?
 It stands for ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’.

 Everyone has a unique D.N.A, even if some look very similar to

another living being.
 D.N.A wrapped in proteins called ‘histones’ are now called
‘chromosomes’.
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What is a GENE?

 The functional unit of heredity.

 The set of instructions that determine what an organism is like,

as well as it’s appearance, among others.
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The D.N.A structure

 The bac bone of D.N.A is made of alternating deoxyribose sugars and phosphate.

 The rungs of the D.N.A ladder are the nucleotide bases.

 There are 4 bases in D.N.A that are held by hydrogen bonds :

• Adenine(A)
• Thymine(T)
• Guanine(G)
• Cytosine(C)

 According to Erwin Chargaff, the percentage of adenine and thymine are always
almost equal to each other, the same thing can be said about guanine and
cytosine. This is called THE CHARGAFF RULE
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Non-Mendelian Inheritance

Gregor Mendel is an Austrian monk, who discovered how inheritance

through his experiments with pea plants. He is known as the father of
genetics because of said discovery.
There are 3 laws under Mendelian inheritance :
 Law of Dominance : when a purebred/homozygous dominant trait is
crossed with a recessive trait, all the resulting offspring will have that
dominant trait.
 Law of Segregation : each individual that is a diploid has a pair of
alleles (copy) for a particular trait.
 Law of Independent Assortment : the alleles of two (or more) different
genes get sorted into gametes independently of one another.
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An Allele is an alternate form of a gene. It is one of the two or more versions

of a known mutation at the same place on a chromosome. The place where
the allele is located is called the locus.
Not all traits follow Mendel’s laws, these are called non-Mendelian traits.
Non-Mendelian inheritance involves incomplete dominance, codominance,
sex-linked, and multiple alleles.
Incomplete dominance is when the homozygous dominant trait is crossed
with a recessive trait, the result would be the expression of a trait that is in
between the dominant and recessive traits.
Codominance is when the two different traits are both present in an
individual.
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Sex-linked Inheritance

There are 23 pairs or 46 chromosomes in humans. The first 22 pairs are

termed as autosomes, and the 23rd pair is either XX or XY chromosomes.
 Females have two X chromosomes

 Males have one x and one y chromosomes

X-linked traits are traits that are linked to the X chromosome, color blindness
is an example of X-linked traits. In males, if their x chromosome is affected
then the male is already color blind. Females need both of their X
chromosomes to be affected to be color blind, if only one of the X
chromosomes are affected then they are only carriers of the trait.
Hemophilia is another example of X-linked recessive trait. People who have
hemophilia bleed longer than a normal person due to their blood not being
able to clot.
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Multiple Alleles

There are three alleles for the ABO human blood type:
 A - indicates the presence of the A antigen

 B - indicates the presence of the B antigen

 O - indicates the absence of any antigen

Knowing about blood types are important in blood transfusion.