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Autosomal dominant and autosomal recessive inheritance, the two most common Mendelian inheritance patterns. An autosome is any chromosome other than a sex chromosome.. In genetics, dominance is the phenomenon of one variant of a gene on a chromosome masking or overriding the effect of a different variant of the same gene on the other copy of the chromosome.
The alleles of genes can either be dominant or recessive. A dominant allele needs only one copy to be expressed while a recessive allele needs two copies (homozygous) in a diploid organism to be expressed. Dominant and recessive alleles help to determine the offspring's genotypes, and therefore phenotypes. [citation needed]
According to the model of Mendelian inheritance, alleles may be dominant or recessive, one allele is inherited from each parent, and only those who inherit a recessive allele from each parent exhibit the recessive phenotype. Offspring with either one or two copies of the dominant allele will display the dominant phenotype.
In this case, someone who expresses an X-linked dominant allele will exhibit the disorder and be considered affected. [citation needed] The pattern of inheritance is sometimes called criss-cross inheritance. [7] X-linked dominant traits do not necessarily affect males more than females (unlike X-linked recessive traits). The exact pattern of ...
Normally, two recessive alleles need to be inherited (one from each parent) for the recessive trait to be expressed but recessive merely means that the trait is only expressed in the absence of the dominant alleles. The pattern of inheritance in which a single recessive allele is inherited but is still expressed is known as pseudodominance.
The principle of dominant inheritance discovered by Mendel states that in a heterozygote the dominant allele will cause the recessive allele to be "masked": that is, not expressed in the phenotype. Only if an individual is homozygous with respect to the recessive allele will the recessive trait be expressed.
Where the heterozygote is indistinguishable from one of the homozygotes, the allele expressed is the one that leads to the "dominant" phenotype, [9] [10] and the other allele is said to be "recessive". The degree and pattern of dominance varies among loci.
Autosomal dominant-recessive inheritance is made possible by the fact that the individuals of most species (including all higher animals and plants) have two alleles of most hereditary predispositions because the chromosomes in the cell nucleus are usually present in pairs . Carriers can be female or male as the autosomes are homologous ...