Thread: The X chromosome you inherit from your mother, is it either of her two X chromosomes?

  1. #1
    Registered User
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    The X chromosome you inherit from your mother, is it either of her two X chromosomes?

    As you probably know, a man inheritated an X chromosome from his mother, while he inheritated a Y chromosome from his father, and a woman inheritated one X chromosome from her mother, and another one from her father.

    Now, I am wondering about this, the X chromosome that either sex inheritated from his/her mother, could that be either of her X chromosomes, or is it perhaps a combination of the two?

    example:

    Code:
         XX    XY                                     XX    XY
        |      |                                      |        |
         \    /                                        \      /
          X Y - offspring, man | OR |        X Y - offspring, man
    Is it like the above example, where it would be a 50% chance of inheritating either of the mother's chromosomes.

    other example:

    Code:
        ___
        |XX|  XY
        -----    |
        |     |
         \   /
           X Y
    Or is it like the other example, where the mother's X chromosome is a combination of her two X chromosomes.


    Hope you can answer my question.


    EDIT: never mind about the examples, I think you can understand my question in pure theory anyway
    Last edited by Zewu; 06-28-2003 at 08:27 AM.

  2. #2
    .........
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    When a female produces eggs, each one of them has one X chromosone. Every single one of them. When a male produces sperm, each one has either an X or a Y. If a sperm with an X fertilizes the egg you get a girl. When a sperm with a Y chromosone fertilizes the egg you get a guy. So no it does not matter which X, because every X in the female is in a different egg. The whole XX and XY thing is used to figure out the chance of how many will be girls/boys and how many will have sex linked diseases like being color blind etc. I think you were trying to make it more complicated than it really is

  3. #3
    Wannabe Coding God
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    actouly the gender is not determined by the X & Y cromosons. It's determend by a protoin witch they make,sometimes they make the wrong protoin so it is posible for a female to be XY and a male to be XX. But it is very unusal.
    They say that if you play a Windows Install CD backwords, you hear satanic messages. That's nothing; play it forward and it installs Windows.

  4. #4
    Toaster Zach L.'s Avatar
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    Then there are bizarre conditions like XXX, XXY, and XYY.

    Oh no... biology is coming back to me.
    The word rap as it applies to music is the result of a peculiar phonological rule which has stripped the word of its initial voiceless velar stop.

  5. #5
    Registered User DDPhoenix's Avatar
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    I think both Shogun and SourceCode are right on this one: there's a protein called the "Testis-Determining Factor" made by a gene on the Y-chromosome that starts a whole sequence of events that lead to the development of a male fetus (activates and deactivates other genes/proteins). Without this gene and protein, the fetus will become female by default.

    Out of curiosity, why do you ask?

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