ajmst37 at vms.cis.pitt.edu wrote:
: hello,
: I have a question regarding genetics.
: I was watching the show "Medicine Ball" tonite and was wondering about
: something. Two dwarves had a child, and the father said that there was
: a one-in-four chance of the child being non-dwarf. But if the parents
: are dwarves, does that not mean that they are both homozygous recessive?
: wouldn't this mean that there is no chance of the child being a non-dwarf?
: I'm only a sophmore in college, so I might just be undereducated on the
: subject.
: Very curious,
Don't always assume genetic disorders are recessive. Achondroplasia,
a major form of genetic dwarfism, is dominant for dwarfism (and I
believe a recessive lethal). Both parents are heterozygotes.
The best on-line resource for this On-Line Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM)
E-mail mailserv at gdb.org
Gopher gopher.gdb.org
WWW http://gdbwww.gdb.org/
It is a standard textbook on human genetic disease.
BTW sci.bio or bionet.general are more appropriate for this sort
of question (_micro_biology is probably a particularly bad place to
put it)
Keith Robison
Harvard University
Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology
Department of Genetics / HHMI
robison at mito.harvard.edu
