Quotes About Alleles

Most of the replicators in the world have won their place in it by defeating all available alternative alleles. The weapons with which they won, and the weapons with which their rivals lost, are their respective phenotypic consequences

What does complementariness mean for genes? Two genes may be said to be complementary if the survival of each, relative to its alleles, is enhanced when the other is abundant in the population.

We are fundamentally interested in natural selection, therefore in the differential survival of replicating entities such as genes. Genes are favoured or disfavoured relative to their alleles as a consequence of their phenotypic effects upon the world. Some of these phenotypic effects may be incidental consequences of others, and have no bearing on the survival chances, one way or the other, of the genes concerned.

Two kinds of factor will affect this half-life. Firstly, replicators whose phenotypic effects render them successful at their business of propagating themselves will tend to have a long half-life. Replicators with longer half-lives than their alleles will come to predominate in the population, and this is the familiar process of natural selection.

It is important to consider whether the sample size selected by the Environmental Genome Project will provide sufficient power to discover most alleles relevant to gene-environment interactions.

When blue-eyed Donald Trump married hazel-eyed Ivana Zelnickova, he probably figured his broad-shouldered DNA would dominate her girly alleles. But genetics played a cruel trick on Trump: Of the couple's three children, only the youngest, Eric, wound up with his father's fishy blue eyes.

single base may change from A to C. A stretch of a hundred bases may be accidentally copied out twice. A thousand bases may be cut out altogether. These are the mutations that scientists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan spent years trying to figure out. Mutations can produce new versions of genes—alleles, as they came to be known.

It is important to consider whether the sample size selected by the Environmental Genome Project will provide sufficient power to discover most alleles relevant to gene-environment interactions.