Talk:Dominance (genetics)/Archive 1

Error in Figure
The first Punnett Square on this page doesn't look right at all. Could someone have mixed up the values? -- bdesham


 * No replies, so I'm fixing it myself. -- bdesham

Sickle Cell Example
"For these examples, the homozygous traits are more serious than the heterozygous trait. In fact, carriers of SCA are better off!" - I'll attack this bit later on, unless someone else gets there before me. Need to explain why SCA carriers have an advantage... Nick04 18:04, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The section on co-dominance and the molecular mechanisms for dominance is sketchy. I don't know enough to fill it out but this would be helpful! Zrenneh 21:11 GMT, 24 Jan 2005

Co-dominance is just an extreme form of incomplete dominance (??)


 * Nope, it's not, it's very different. --Crusio 21:02, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

The mention that that the sickle cell trait is dominant for malaria resistance is inaccurate. Individuals homozygous for sickle cell are extremely vulnerable to malaria. I've deleted it. Pstemari (talk) 05:05, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

POV section
''As a side note, some schools of thought believe that the gene labeled properly here as R' should be labled r. This school of thought, although at one time prevelant, is now known to be completely backward. This notion implies a completly false premise. The proprieters of this school of thought, notably Meg Ropski, are slowly converting to the right notation.''

This section has a strong non-Neutral Point of View. Until why this notation is "backward" etc can be cited it should be removed. Debivort 16:45, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Proposed merging and rename
The result was merge the autosomal dominant, recessive allele and dominant allele into this article. Chris 22:01, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

The article page says that there is discussion of merging this article with various other articles, and refers to this talk page. There is no discussion here, so I'll just make a little comment: alleles are not dominant or recessive; traits associated with alleles are dominant of recessive. It's a subtle distinction, but can eliminate some confusion down the road. Otherwise, without looking at dominant allele or recessive allele, I say they are two sides of the same coin and should just point to this article. Likewise, autosomal dominant really addresses two issues (sex chromosomes, and dominance) and I don't think it makes a good article. It should just point this article and/or one about sex chromosomes. AdamRetchless 02:14, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

This article is extremely badly named. how do we find our way from all the other similar sections? I think either a merge or some sort of disambiguation page is in order. PLEASEEEEEE! --Manboobies 14:28, 25 March 2006 (UTC)


 * This article is correctly named. The merge will happen as soon as somebody takes the task. I've made a start, but a little help or at least recognition goes a long way. - User:Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:29, 28 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I've noticed this little poorly designed section of Wikipedia several times in my editing. It would be nice to have a good page to link autosomal dominant, recessive, etc. to. I would take up the merge but there's far too many pages to automatically link. I agree with all of the merge icons, though! InvictaHOG 21:05, 3 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Agree but any merge would ideally need links from other articles pointing to the merged articles to point towards the relevant section in this article. At the moment that is approximately 170 for Autosomal dominant, 7 for Dominant allele, 120 for Recessive gene, 50 for Dominant gene. If a bot owner could be persuaded to relink all these it would make the job a lot simpler. --apers0n 11:47, 22 September 2006 (UTC)


 * A redirect~section on each of the merged articles would lead links to the article and section without breaking any links, the double link could probably be fixed by a general purpose bot later Leevanjackson 00:36, 3 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Agree, but we need to make sure not to sacrifice the content of each of the articles when we merge four or five of them just to make them shorter. I, as a layperson foreign to this field, know little on the subject and need that little bit of extra information on each topic. Valley2city 07:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

How about renaming to Inheritance of dominant and recessive traits instead of "dominance relationship" upon merge of autosomal dominant,dominant allele,dominant gene and recessive allele. "Dominance relationship" sounds more like interpersonal psychology that genetics. Dr d12 22:09, 9 December 2006 (UTC)


 * That would exclude co-dominance, partial dominance, genetic maternal effects, etc. It is whaat dominance/recessive/partial dominance is known as.  I suspect most people would be led to the article through redirection from dominant allele, recessive trait, or others.  I see no need for a change. Genetics411 03:10, 10 December 2006 (UTC)


 * No it wouldn't. With all due respect, you're being far too picky. "Inheritance of dominant and recessive traits" would be a good general description of the topic.  Why would an article on dominant traits exclude specific subsets of genetic dominance?  As it stands now, the name of this article — "Dominance relationship" — sounds like an article on BDSM.  Indeed, when I clicked on autosomal dominant in the Marfan Syndrome article and this page came up, I thought there had been a mistake.  24.6.66.193 (talk) 22:49, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

How about renaming to 'genetic dominance'?

As someone with a disease described as "Autosomal Dominant" I like the fact that there is a specific article about it. I would urge to keep this title. If there are over 100 links to it from other articles, it is for a reason. As someone who knows litte about genetics I just searched the specific words and would not have know to search somthing other than "Autosomal Dominant" I also didn't really care to read about recessive or x-linked genes, so I liked the short and sweet article.cH 09:20, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Need evidence to list traits
I think the list of traits that are governed by simple dominant/recessive relationships is sloppy. I understand it's appeal to the lay-person, but I suspect that many items in that list are over-simplified if not wrong. It may be best to erase the whole list until we can link to a good reference describing the genetics of the traits in question (in Wikipedia or externally). AdamRetchless 02:17, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Please mention information on muliple polyploidic organisms... I would write an article but am affraid my technical knowledge is not up to par- not to mention spelling abilities. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.38.242.55 (talk)

New categories?
Rather than having endless lists in this article with dominant and recessive disorders/conditions, what about creating new categories Category:Autosomal recessive disorders and Category:Autosomal dominant disorders, perhaps even Category:X-linked disorders? Or else move the lists to a list of dominant and recessive disorders article. --apers0n 11:57, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes I completely agree. Those categories would be just the trick.


 * Creating categories would mean they would all have to have an entry in Wikipedia. Most are too trivial.  They, of course, also show a human bias.  High school science reports not withstanding, they could probably simply be deleted. Genetics411 20:46, 20 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Most (or all) of the information under
 * "3.4 Genetic diseases can also be carried by dominant or recessive alleles" and
 * "3.5 Some genetic diseases inherited as autosomal dominant traits"
 * Is convered quite nicely in two other wiki articles Genetic disorder and List of genetic disorders
 * I am deleting 3.4 and 3.5 from this article and pasting it into the talk pages of Genetic disorder and List of genetic disorders in case they want to incorporate anything they might have missed.
 * I don't see "3.2 Human traits governed by simple dominance" covered elsewhere, so it is now a section in Human genetics Dr d12 20:31, 2 December 2006 (UTC)dr_d12

Autosomal
is height autosomal?
 * Yes, height is autosomal. Everything except gender is autosomal. Ari Brown 21:31 March 22, 2007
 * Please disregard the above. Color blindness is an example of a non-gender sex-linked trait. Height is almost assuredly a multigenic trait that has autosomal and sex-linked components. Debivort 03:02, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
 * To put it another way- There may be lots of other genes on the sex chromosome, doing things which are nothing to do with gender itself.

IceDragon64 (talk) 00:18, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Unreadable to laymen
'Recessive Gene' is redirected to this page, which uses jargon so heavily that it is useless to the layman. I have a Bachelor of Science, and the entire introduction is essentially meaningless to me. How the average person would cope, I have no idea. The rest of the article isn't much better; it's essentially unreadable.

Oh well, I suppose that this is Wikipedia. Famous for articles that pay no attention to audience, relevancy, context, or even accuracy. Frankly, for an entity that pretends to be an 'encyclopedia', someone would be best off deleting this article, and starting again, with thought as to what is relevant for the layman.

I won't be doing it, because I don't even know what a recessive gene is. That's what I came here to find out. I found nothing.
 * There are no "recessive genes". Only recessive phenes - which are conferred by a specific allele of some gene (or genes) that have a dominant-recessive relationship. And yes, the article needs rewrite, and yes, the Britannica definitely shows how it ought to be done.

For anyone who chooses to replace this abysmal article, I recommend that you look at Britannica's explanation of recessiveness and dominance, which I just looked up. Britannica provided more understanding in 2 paragraphs than this entire article, by providing a simple example.

Overhaul?
The article needs overhaul to get rid of all the "dominant gene", "recessive allele" etc nonsense. Genes (usually - except in differential regulation, but we know too little about gene regulation in general) do not confer trait variation, they confer the trait as such (head hair for example), not how exactly it is expressed (blonde vs brown). Alleles are versions of genes; diploid organisms as we are can only have 2 different alleles at the same time out of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of possible allele variants a gene can have (usually - we can theoretically have 4, 6, 8, ... alleles of the same gene paralog genes). Traits, or phenes, are dominant and recessive (and codominant etc).

Theoretically, an allele could be dominant or recessive itself (think Dawkins, extended phenotype, genes as phenes etc). This would be the case if it itself directly affects that very gene's function (e.g. by gene silencing) more or less strongly: for example an allele that switches off the gene of which it is a version - regardless of what other allele may also be present in the other copy of that gene - would arguably be a "dominant allele". I don't believe this has been demonstrated yet to exist; there is a case (in ribosomal gene expression I think) where something similar is known to exist, but this only regards the process of self-regulation as such, not whether there are different alleles. Although I'm usually pretty open to freaky and unexpected ways and means of interaction on the genetic level, I can't as of here and now think of a mechanism by which such "true allele dominance" would be conferred. Lack/presence of gene methylation recognition motifs for example are not the alleles (with/without the motif in a certain position) regulating themselves, but being regulated by an external mechanism.

I have tried to make the introduction better, but the thing requires more work. Dysmorodrepanis 02:34, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the article needs cleanup and overhaul. The examples are too complicated and as remarked in the previous section, the article is incomprehensible to a layman (heck, I'm a geneticist and I myself have difficulties understanding most of this text!) It would perhaps be best to just limit the article to a few, clear examples, such as pea color (did Mendel ever study pea flower color??) I don't have more time now, perhaps I'll try to get back to this later. I have cleaned the intro up a bit, though, but much more needs be done. --Crusio 21:15, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Bi-polar is autosomal dominant?
There is no citation for this, and as an affective-disorder researcher I'm not aware of any evidence to support this!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.53.23.225 (talk) 19:05, 9 November 2007 (UTC)


 * You're absolutely right. I have removed this link. As with most psychiatric disorders, bipolar disorder is polygenic (with significant environmental influences). There may be more wrong examples, but I don't know most of the disorders listed and have no time to chek them out. Perhaps we should just remove most and only leave some examples, such as Huntington's chorea. --Crusio 21:21, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

I've rewritten the Introduction
It's not shorter but I think it's much clearer. I'll try to work on some of the other problems soon.

Rosieredfield 23:15, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

I think the second paragraph could be worded more clearly. I was thinking about something like this:

"For example, if both sexes' genomes contain a copy of the same allele of the EYCL3 gene that produces a brown iris, the offspring will also have a brown iris; similarly, if both parents have the same allele for a blue iris, the offspring will have a blue iris. But if the two parents have, respectively, a brown allele and a blue allele, the offspring will have a brown allele—thus, the brown allele is said to be dominant over the blue allele (and the blue allele is said to be recessive to the brown allele)."

HeretiKc (talk) 04:07, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

It's the character state that is dominant or recessive, not the allele. Take the c gene (albino). Pigmented is dominant over albino but if you look at the effects of htese alleles on the underlying enzyme defect, the heterozygote is completely intermediary between the two parents and there is no dominance (additive inheritance). --Crusio (talk) 08:28, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Incomplete dominance
This description is incorrect. The situation described is the absence of dominance (or additive inheritance). Incomplete dominance means that the heterozygote's phenotype is not exactly the mean of the two heterozygote homozygot parents, nor is is identical to either of the two parents; its phenotype lies somewhere between the parental mean and one of the homozygotes. The concept of overdominance (the heterozygote lies outside the range of the two parental homozygotes) is missing completely. --Crusio 16:36, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

"Incomplete dominance means that the heterozygote's phenotype is not exactly the mean of the two heterozygote parents"... the two homozygous parents? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.82.216.201 (talk) 04:50, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Correct, thanks! --Crusio (talk) 07:35, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Two non-identical recessive genes
I've made a minor change to address this condition. The previous comment required the alleles to be [exact] copies in order for the recessive gene to express itself, which appears inaccurate. I've cited a reference for this change. Rezarob —Preceding comment was added at 04:10, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

wild type
The "wild type" is often referred to, but what is it? 89.245.105.0 (talk) 21:11, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

"Wild-type" refers to whatever trait, organism, &c as it typically/normally occurs in nature, or in the wild. Hence, "wild-type." Doorsguy36 (talk) 15:46, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Removing lists
The article should properly be about genetic dominance, regardless of organism. This applies to many characteristics, not all of them disorders. I therefore feel that the lists of dominant and recessive disorders (limited to humans at that) are not at their place here and also are becoming too unwieldy. I propose to move them to two separate articles (which can then be linked to under "see also") entitled "List of human autosomal dominant disorders" and "List if human autosomal recessive disorders". If nobody objects, I'll go ahead. --Crusio (talk) 10:45, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Dominant traits versus dominant alleles?
>then that allele is said to be dominant. The other allele, which has no tangible effect on the organism's phenotype, is said to be recessive.

According to Eric Lander's lecture (Lecture 6, MIT OCW 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2004) phenotypes, not alleles can be dominant or recessive. He stresses that there are examples when the same gene controls two traits, and an allele is dominant for one trait and not for another. He also points out that many textbooks get this wrong. I'm not in any shape or form a specialist on genetics, so I don't want to edit it, but maybe someone else knows what the deal is? (Seems like Crusio was making the same point earlier (?).) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.95.1.25 (talk) 20:59, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Lander's a classical geneticist, not one of those molecular biologists thinking they are geneticists... :-) What you write here is absolutely correct, it's the trait state (such as green or yellow for peas) that is dominant or recessive, not the allele. At the DNA level, everything is co-dominant... --Crusio (talk) 22:36, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Article name
The name "dominance relationship" is awkward, nobody in genetics ever uses that expression. "Dominance (genetics)" is more appropriate and I propose to move the article there. Any objections? --Crusio (talk) 00:49, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 15:45, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Please Explain How Recessive Traits Can Evolve?
I was hoping to find in this article an explanation of how new recessive traits can evolve. Can someone add this to the article? It's been suggested that a mutation to create a new recessive gene will (1) not be expressed and therefore beneficial to the first carrier, or even if expressed in the first carrier will not be available in any mates whose dominant gene will wipe out the recessive gene in the offspring. Unless the offspring mate rather quickly to build up a stock of carriers, the new mutation will be lost. Is that correct? Or are there other factors going on which could be added to this article, perhaps under the heading "Evolutionary Path of Recessive Traits." Thanks. I hope to see it in the future.--GodBlessYou55 (talk) 04:00, 8 August 2008 (UTC)


 * They take many more generations to show up than a dominant allele, since they have to increase in number to the point where pairs of them become somewhat common. That's what a want a graph to show, see my request above. Richard001 (talk) 09:35, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Karl/Carl Correns?
I changed the name Karl Correns to Carl Correns and linked it to the page named "Carl Correns". My reasons are the following: 1. It appears that both spellings of the name are valid. 2. The original write-up was referenced from Answers.com and did not contain the link to the relevant page as might have been desired. 3. Utah State Office of Education mentions Karl Correns while Genetics 101 by Michael Windelspecht mentions Carl Correns.

Please let me know if the change is acceptable. Also, should the text "(sometimes spelt Karl)" be introduced after his name?

Voxpolaris16 (talk) 06:28, 18 September 2008 (UTC)