Quotes About Chromosome

A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.

The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of many duplicate copies. It is not infinitely long-lived. Even a diamond is not literally everlasting, and even a cistron can be cut in two by crossing-over. The gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection.

In principle, we may consider any portion of chromosome as a potential candidate for the title of replicator.

The word allele is nowadays customarily used of cistrons but it is clearly easy, and in the spirit of this chapter, to generalize it to any portion of chromosome.

An arbitrarily defined length of chromosome, or potential replicator, may be said to have an expected half-life, measured in generations.

But if we set selection pressures on one side, we can say something about the half-life of a replicator on the basis of its length alone. If the stretch of chromosome we choose to define as our replicator of interest is long, it will tend to have a shorter half-life than a shorter replicator, simply because it is more likely to be broken by crossing-over. A very long portion of chromosome ceases to deserve the title of replicator at all.

Am I the only one around here who thinks Maya has a hidden Y chromosome?" Hayley said. "If she does, she's hiding it pretty good," Corey said, giving me a lascivious once-over.

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Severe cases of Turner's, where a girl's second X chromosome was missing entirely, were easy to identify. Small stature plus certain telltale physical features—low-set ears, a low hairline, folds of excess skin at the sides of the neck—could have no other cause.

Oxytocin and vasopressin are chemically similar hormones; the DNA sequences that constitute their genes are similar, and the two genes occur close to each other on the same chromosome. There was a single ancestral gene that, a few hundred million years ago, was accidentally "duplicated" in the genome, and the DNA sequences in the two copies of the gene drifted independently, evolving into two closely related genes

There must be a bad chromosome somewhere in man that urges him to wound that which he can't conquer, deface that which is more beautiful, misunderstand and befoul the work of another.

If we one day will know that some freak mutation made the human insanity and exploration thing possible, it will be amazing to think that it was this little inversion on this chromosome that made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything," he said at one point. At another, he said, "We are crazy in some way. What drives it? That I would really like to understand. That would be really, really cool to know." *

Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm, identifying a deviant gene on the second chromo-some that causes lactase persistence. (The gene is SNP C/T13910, if you care.)

To give the statement life and colour, let me anticipate what will be explained in much more detail later, namely, that the most essential part of a living cell – the chromosome fibre – may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal.

What do cells do when they see a broken piece of DNA? Cells don't like such breaks. They'll do pretty much anything they can to fix things up. If a chromosome is broken, the cells will repair the break using an intact chromosome.

There must be a bad chromosome somewhere in man that urges him to wound that which he can't conquer, deface that which is more beautiful, misunderstand and befoul the work of another.

We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.

Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

Dirty four. It's what some geneticists call the DRD4 gene.

The ability to read DNA allowed scientists to measure this genetic similarity in real people. In 2006, Peter Visscher, a geneticist at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia, and his colleagues studied 4,401 pairs of siblings, examining several hundred genetic markers in each volunteer. The siblings often had a series of identical genetic markers along a chromosome—segments they inherited from one of their parents.

Turns out, Down syndrome is the most common genetic disorder, occurring once in every 800 births, and no one really knows why it happens. It just does.

I think I was a feminist before being born. I had a feminist chromosome somewhere.

Something is definitely wrong with my feelings about marriage and procreation. I worry that not only am I missing the chromosome that allows me to dance respectably, but that I am also lacking a conventional vagina.

He also thinks there's something in the Carpathian woman's chemistry that makes it impossible for the female chromosome to beat out the male." "Wouldn't you know he'd think it was the woman," Shea sniffed contemptuously.