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Glossary of scientific and technical terms in bioengineering and biological engineering
Published in Megh R. Goyal, Scientific and Technical Terms in Bioengineering and Biological Engineering, 2018
Mendelian inheritance is a hereditary process where genetic traits are passed from parents to offspring and are explained in terms of chromosomes separating, independent assortment of genes and the homologous exchange of segments of DNA. There are three modes of Mendelian inheritance: autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive and X-linked inheritance.
Heredity under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome
Published in Annals of Science, 2021
The first time I asked one of the pioneers of medical genetics about the impact of the DNA double helix on their field and he replied, ‘Basically, none’, I was stunned. It was common knowledge that the history of molecular genetics led directly from the double helix, solved in 1953, to the Human Genome Project, with its promise of genetically personalized medicine, announced complete in 2003. But I kept receiving the same answer and eventually the picture clarified. Although the first instance of Mendelian inheritance in humans dates to 1902 – the very origins of genetics as a science – medical genetics, and human genetics more broadly, went nowhere slowly for half a century. While fruit flies, maize, mice, and moulds had their chromosomes stained, counted, and mapped, human chromosomes were just too damned difficult to see and count. In 1953, the biology textbooks all said, mistakenly, that a human cell contained forty-eight chromosomes.
Developing gene drive technologies to eradicate invasive rodents from islands
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2018
Caroline M. Leitschuh, Dona Kanavy, Gregory A. Backus, Rene X. Valdez, Megan Serr, Elizabeth A. Pitts, David Threadgill, John Godwin
Genetic pest management offers a potentially attractive alternative to using toxicants for rodent eradication, especially because the methods being proposed are non-lethal. The most promising of these new technologies are gene drive systems. Gene drives are selfish genetic elements that can replicate their genetic sequence and insert it into the genetic sequence of the gametes of a sexually reproducing species. By manipulating a gene drive and adding in a desired trait, humans could theoretically spread the desired trait and, in the case of invasive rodents, suppress wild populations. Most genes have normal Mendelian inheritance, or a 50% chance for each of two alleles for a gene being passed on to the next generation. Gene drive systems have super-Mendelian inheritance, which is broadly defined as an allele having greater than the 50% inheritance pattern expected. Accordingly, they have the potential to spread quickly through a population (Lyttle 1991).