二、基本传输遗传学.doc

第二课 Basic Transmission Genetics January 25,2011 Professor Stephen Stearns:?Okay, Im going to start with an example. Isnt that a great shot of the baby? I mean, the Web is so great. You can download pictures from the Web that just look fantastic. So I want to start by posing you a problem. Jill and John are going to have a baby, and Jills got blue eyes and Johns got brown eyes. Okay? All of the other men whom Jill knows have blue eyes. The baby has blue eyes. [Laughter] Should John be worried? Johns got brown eyes, the babys got blue eyes, should John be worried? Well, we can assume that brown eyes are dominant to blue, which roughly speaking is correct. The actual situation is a bit more complex. In fact, if you want to write a paper on the evolution of eye color and the genetics of eye color, theres a lot out there. But this is approximately correct. And John comes from an island where one percent of the people have blue eyes. So that, just on the face of it, would indicate that maybe John ought to be worried. But in fact just exactly how worried should he be; just based on genetics, not based on behavior or rumors or anything like that? Well well come back to that. I do that at the beginning just to point out that there are interesting issues here, and that they are things that touch our daily lives. So now Im going to run through, as much as I can, genetics, in the next forty minutes. And please speed me up or slow me down, as you wish, and dont hesitate to interrupt. Some of this may already be very familiar to you. So the genetic material is deoxyribose nucleic acid. We have known that since 1945, and weve known its structure since 1953. And this is actually an extremely important point: Genes are solid particles that are transmitted from parent to offspring. They are not fluid. Theyre actually material stuff. Okay? And we know exactly what it is. They encode information, as sequences of nucleotides, and in the DNA its adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. S