Episode 146: Mendelian Genetics and Inheritance

The Science of Everything Podcast

James Fodor

Natural Sciences, Science, Social Sciences

4.8 • 750 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2024

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An introduction to classical Mendelian genetics, in which we discuss Mendel's experiments with peas and the laws of heredity that he discovered, including inheritance of one allele from each parent, the law of dominance, and the law of independent segregation. We then consider more complex cases of genetic inheritance, including sex-linked traits, incomplete dominance, codominance, and epistasis. The episode concludes with a discussion of quantitative traits determined by many genes, including how genetic variation is described, how sources of variance are identified using genome wide association studies, and the conceptual issues with defining heredity and separating the effects of genes from those of environment. If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a PayPal donation or becoming a Patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything Check out out youtube channel!The Science of Everything Podcast - YouTube

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.
0:13.0	Oh, wow.
0:15.0	Oh, my. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 146, Mendelian Genetics.
0:40.3	I'm your host, James Fodor.
0:42.4	In this episode, we're going to discuss the inheritance of genetic traits, focusing on classical or Mendelian genetics.
0:50.3	So this refers to the set of theories and methods that were developed in the kind of late 19th through early 20th century before the molecular revolution before we understood the structure of DNA and were able to manipulate DNA at the molecular level. In particular, we're going to discuss the inheritance of single traits and talk about
1:10.9	Mendel and his pea plants and we'll discuss sex-linked traits and then we'll gradually
1:15.6	build up and look at more complex forms of inheritance that don't obey all of the simple
1:19.5	laws that Mendel derived, including the inheritance of multiple independent traits, then we'll
1:25.1	look at modification of Mendelian ratios, including
1:27.5	incomplete dominance, co-dominence, and epistasis, and penetrance and expressivity, and then
1:33.9	we'll conclude by talking about the inheritance of complex traits, looking at quantitative
1:37.4	traits and heritability. There isn't really any recommended pre-listing for this episode,
1:43.3	because often, in fact,
1:45.0	Medellian Genetics is covered in courses before molecular genetics.
1:49.0	We kind of, in this podcast, did it the other way around.
1:51.0	Though having a little bit of background about molecular genetics certainly wouldn't hurt,
1:56.0	so you could look at episode 34 and 35, where I talk about DNA, structure, and function.
2:02.9	All right, so let's jump straight in and begin by talking about the inheritance of single, simple traits.
2:08.6	So, first of all, let's introduce some key terminology that will be important throughout this episode.
2:13.5	A trait is just a characteristic of an individual.
2:16.4	So something that makes one individual distinctive from another individual.
	...

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