ALBINISM

By:

Miles Thomas

Dan Finelli

Felix Li

February 1, 2010

Period 9/10

A Summary of Albinism

• Albinism is a recessive genetic disorder where the skin, hair, feathers of an animal are discolored from the normal color, it appears to be very odd colored, such as whit or a yellowish color. save for the eyes, where instead of a normal iris color, the iris appears to be pink, red, or blue.

• Albinism is usually easy to spot. You can tell when an animal has albinism when it has a white covering whether the covering is hair, fur or feathers, or if the animal has pink eyes when it usually doesn’t. Also, organisms with albinism have impaired eyesight due their eyes being affected.

What chromosome the Albinism gene is located on

There a few types of Albinism.

OCA type 1 is inherited by a gene on chromosome 11.

OCA type 2 is inherited by a gene on chromosome 15.

OCA type 3 is inherited by a gene on chromosome 9.

They are all inherited in a autosomal recessive manner.

Chromosome 9, where the least serious type of autism occurs.

Mode of Inheritance

Albinism is caused by a recessive allele given by one or both of the parents. There is a chance that two non-albinistic parents may give birth to an albino child. There is also the rare chance of albinism occurring just because of gene mutation.

Albinism is hereditary. It received through an autosomal recessive gene on the X chromosome. X-linked/sex linked refers to genes on the X chromosome.

Autosomal Dominant- One of to any ways an abnormal trait can go through a family. Only one parent needs a copy of the gene to produce an abnormal trait.

Autosomal Recessive- Same as above, but both parents require a copy of the gene to produce a abnormal trait.

Alleles and what they are

An allele is one of the many forms of a gene. Each person have two alleles per gene. One from the

mother, and one from the father. Alleles are represented by capital and non capital

letters. (Let’s use A for an example. A for albinism.)- Like this: AA, Aa, aa. Dominance is when if that allele is in the pair, it will

show it’s trait over the other allele (Ex: AA, or Aa), called the recessive allele. The only way recessive traits can be shown is if both alleles are recessive. (Ex: aa)

X/Sex- Linked is represented by XR.