The Better Breeding Blog Breed Better Animals

You’d know from the previous post that regular body cells such as kidney cells or liver cells undergo mitosis to make identical 2n copies of themselves that regenerate the organs and body as older cells die. Meiosis has a different purpose. It is… more »

From the last post you’ll know that meiosis results in four n cells from one 2n cell. These n cells are known as gametes or sex cells — males make sperm sex cells and females make egg sex cells. Still another term for an n cell is haploid cell.… more »

This post will discuss non-Mendelian inheritance, but first let’s recap Mendelian inheritance. Mendelian inheritance relies on three laws: the law of segregation the law of independent assortment the law of dominance It’s important to stress… more »

We saw earlier how chromosomes randomly assort to form sex cells during meiosis, and that the combination of chromosomes (and alleles) an organism acquires is down to which particular sperm fertilised which particular egg to make it ‘it’ and… more »

This post explains the maths behind the formula 3n × 2m (the number of unique zygotes) mentioned in last week’s post. Let’s go back to that three-locus Punnett square, where both parents are heterozygous at A, B and C. We determined… more »