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The word "allele" is a short form of "allelomorph" ("other form", a word coined by British geneticists William Bateson and Edith Rebecca Saunders) in the 1900s, [7] [8] which was used in the early days of genetics to describe variant forms of a gene detected in different phenotypes and identified to cause the differences between them.
In the case of plant height, one allele caused the plants to be tall, and the other caused plants to be short. When the tall allele was present, the plant would be tall, even if the plant was heterozygous. In order for the plant to be short, it had to be homozygous for the recessive allele. [8] [9]
According to the model of Mendelian inheritance, alleles may be dominant or recessive, one allele is inherited from each parent, and only those who inherit a recessive allele from each parent exhibit the recessive phenotype. Offspring with either one or two copies of the dominant allele will display the dominant phenotype.
In this example, the allele for brown can be called "B" and the allele for red "b". (It is normal to write dominant alleles with capital letters and recessive ones with lower-case letters.) The brown hair daughter has the "brown hair phenotype" but her genotype is Bb, with one copy of the B allele, and one of the b allele.
Thus, allele R is dominant over allele r, and allele r is recessive to allele R. [4] Dominance is not inherent to an allele or its traits . It is a strictly relative effect between two alleles of a given gene of any function; one allele can be dominant over a second allele of the same gene, recessive to a third, and co-dominant with a fourth.
Carriers are usually heterozygous for the recessive allele and therefore still able to pass the allele onto their offspring, where the associated phenotype may reappear if the offspring inherits another copy of the allele. The term is commonly used in medical genetics in the context of a disease-causing recessive allele. centrifugal speciation
If you know the genotypes of the organisms, you can determine which alleles are dominant and which are recessive. For example, if the allele specifying tall stems in pea plants is dominant over the allele specifying short stems, then pea plants that inherit one tall allele from one parent and one short allele from the other parent will also ...
An example in dog coat genetics is the homozygosity with the allele "e e" on the Extension-locus making it impossible to produce any other pigment than pheomelanin. Although the allele "e" is a recessive allele on the extension-locus itself, the presence of two copies leverages the dominance of other coat colour genes.