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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.
The chromosome theory of inheritance is credited to papers by Walter Sutton in 1902 [5] and 1903, [6] as well as to independent work by Theodor Boveri during roughly the same period. [7] Boveri was studying sea urchins , in which he found that all the chromosomes had to be present for proper embryonic development to take place. [ 8 ]
Autosomal dominant and autosomal recessive inheritance, the two most common Mendelian inheritance patterns. An autosome is any chromosome other than a sex chromosome.. In genetics, dominance is the phenomenon of one variant of a gene on a chromosome masking or overriding the effect of a different variant of the same gene on the other copy of the chromosome.
This principle of "independent assortment" of genes is fundamental to genetic inheritance. [28] However, the frequency of recombination is actually not the same for all gene combinations. This leads to the notion of " genetic distance ", which is a measure of recombination frequency averaged over a (suitably large) sample of pedigrees.
In it, Fisher puts forward the "infinitesimal model", a genetics conceptual model showing that continuous variation amongst phenotypic traits could be the result of Mendelian inheritance. The paper also contains the first use of the statistical term variance. [2] It is considered the foundation of quantitative genetics. [3]
Heritability is an important concept in quantitative genetics, particularly in selective breeding and behavior genetics (for instance, twin studies). It is the source of much confusion due to the fact that its technical definition is different from its commonly-understood folk definition.
August Weismann proposed the germ plasm theory in the 19th century, before the foundation of modern genetics. Germ plasm ( German : Keimplasma ) is a biological concept developed in the 19th century by the German biologist August Weismann .
Genomic imprinting is an inheritance process independent of the classical Mendelian inheritance. [11] It is an epigenetic process that involves DNA methylation and histone methylation without altering the genetic sequence.