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Lecture 4 Mendelian Inheritance

The document discusses Mendelian inheritance, highlighting Mendel's foundational work on genes and their segregation during reproduction. It outlines Mendel's laws, including the law of segregation and the law of independent assortment, as well as exceptions such as incomplete dominance, co-dominance, and sex-linked traits. The principles of inheritance are illustrated using the garden pea and examples of traits in humans, such as hemophilia.

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Lecture 4 Mendelian Inheritance

The document discusses Mendelian inheritance, highlighting Mendel's foundational work on genes and their segregation during reproduction. It outlines Mendel's laws, including the law of segregation and the law of independent assortment, as well as exceptions such as incomplete dominance, co-dominance, and sex-linked traits. The principles of inheritance are illustrated using the garden pea and examples of traits in humans, such as hemophilia.

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mohamedibrahimmagdy2005
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Genetics (SGS124n)

Lecture 4: Mendelian Inheritance

By : Dr.Samar Elkhateeb
Lecturer of Biochemistry and genetics
[email protected]
• Mendel was the first scientist to observe that characteristics were
inherited as separate units (genes).
• Mendel suggested that each parent has pairs of genes but contributes
with only one of each pair to offspring.
• Mendel recognized that a gene can exist in different forms (alleles).
• He concluded that an organism has 2 different alleles. One of them may
be dominant ( represented by capital letter) and the other is said to
recessive (represented by small letter) .
Mendel Carefully Chose His Organism
 Pisum sativum: the garden pea
1. Very productive: produces many peas (large N: good statistics)
2. Short life cycle: produce many generations in a short time
3. Typically self-pollinating: good for inbreeding
4. Easily cross-pollinated due to flower structure
 Has 7 distinct phenotypic characteristics:
1. Yellow versus green seeds
2. Round versus wrinkled seeds
3. Green versus yellow pods
4. Tall versus short plants
5. Fat versus tight pods
6. White versus grey seed coats
7. Flowers: end of stem versus along the length of stem
Mendel's laws

First Law: Law of segregation:


• States that alleles brought together in F1 generation can be segregated at F2
generation.
• Mendel's observations on inheritance of a single gene were based on the
events of meiosis, when a gamete is produced the 2 copies of a particular
gene Separate each being carried by a single homologue of chromosome
pair.
Cont.

• Segregation occurs in meiosis at


MI and then at MII.
• As a result, the ova or sperm
contribute different homologous
chromosomes to the progeny.

Ova or sperm
Cont.
Example of Mendel’s Crosses

 Mendel knew nothing of the


chemical basis for inheritance.
 He had to work very carefully and
examine ONLY the outward
appearance of the plants.
 He compared what we call today
the phenotype, which is the
outward expression of the genes.
Cont.

• He discovered that certain characters , when present , mask others, e.g.


tallness masks shortness.(Tallness=Dominant, Shortness=Recessive).
• The genotype is the genetic makeup of a cell, an organism, or an individual
(i.e. the specific allele makeup of the individual which can be homozygous
or heterozygous)
• In order that a plant becomes short , it should be homozygous for shortness
(tt).
• Not all tall plants are purely tall, some of them can be homozygous, while
others are heterozygous (Tt) (Carrier).
Cont.

Second Law:The law of independent assortment


 Mendel concluded that a gene for one trait does not influence the
transmission of a gene for another trait, this is true for genes on separate
chromosomes.
 However, when genes are located very close on the same chromosome
they segregate together (linked).
Cont.
Exceptions to Mendel's rules

The genetic principles that Mendel discovered in plants apply to humans as


well, but sometimes genes don’t easily conform to the so called Mendelian
patterns of inheritance.
• The exceptions to Mendel’s laws are:
1. Incomplete Dominance
2. Co-dominance
3. Sex linked traits
Incomplete Dominance

• If the heterozygote state is different from either states , the genes involved
are said to show intermediate inheritance.
Co-dominance

• Co-dominance occurs when the contributions of both alleles are visible in


the phenotype
Sex linked traits

• In humans and other mammal species, gender is determined by two sex


chromosomes called the X chromosome and the Y chromosome. Human
females are typically XX; males are typically XY.
• Genetic traits on the X and Y chromosomes are called sex linked.
• Sex linked traits tends to be characteristic of one sex or the other.
For example, an X-linked recessive
allele in humans causes hemophilia.
Hemophilia is much more common in
males than females because males
are hemizygous (one X).
This means they only have one copy of
the gene in and therefore express the
trait when they inherit one mutant allele.
In contrast, a female must inherit two
mutant alleles, a less frequent event
since the mutant allele is rare in the
population

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