Saturday, November 20, 2010

What is genetic inheritance?

Genetic Inheritance
From the beginning of time every living thing has inherited traits from someone, somewhere. When our parents created us, we received some of our traits from our mother and some from our father. Where do these traits come from? They come from genes within a strand of DNA.   Almost all of our physical and personality traits come from our genes. In short, a gene holds instruction on how to build proteins which are the machinery that make a cell and ultimately an organism. The organism can then pass the genetic traits to offspring.
In some families a genetic disorder may become diagnosed and families then become interested in who was the carrier for the gene, whether their other children will be likely to have the disorder and so on. Naturally there are many questions that people have when a disorder arises in the family and many of them can be answered with knowing how the condition was inherited. I am going to be focusing on five of those genetic inheritances by explaining what the characteristics are and to the left of each page you will see links where you can read about a specific disease relating to that mode of inheritance. A couple of them even have personal experiences of those going through these first hand. 

Listed below are the five modes of inheritance.

(Click on the links below or to the side for more information)