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Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents.
Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution . Gregor Mendel , a Moravian Augustinian friar working in the 19th century in Brno , was the first to study genetics scientifically.
Population genetics is the branch of evolutionary biology responsible for investigating processes that cause changes in allele and genotype frequencies in populations based upon Mendelian inheritance. [3] Four different forces can influence the frequencies: natural selection, mutation, gene flow (migration), and genetic drift. A population can ...
Heritability can be univariate – examining a single trait – or multivariate – examining the genetic and environmental associations between multiple traits at once. This allows a test of the genetic overlap between different phenotypes: for instance hair color and eye color. Environment and genetics may also interact, and heritability ...
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to genetics: . Genetics – science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms. [1] [2] Genetics deals with the molecular structure and function of genes, and gene behavior in context of a cell or organism (e.g. dominance and epigenetics), patterns of inheritance from parent to offspring, and gene distribution ...
Genetic disorders are diseases that are caused by a single allele of a gene and are inherited in families. These include Huntington's disease , cystic fibrosis or Duchenne muscular dystrophy . Cystic fibrosis, for example, is caused by mutations in a single gene called CFTR and is inherited as a recessive trait.
In biology, the word gene has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity.The molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA.
Darwin's own theory of heredity, pangenesis, did not meet with any large degree of acceptance. [14] [15] A more mathematical version of pangenesis, one which dropped much of Darwin's Lamarckian holdovers, was developed as the "biometrical" school of heredity by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. [16]