Learn the difference between dominant alleles and recessive alleles.
Genes vs Alleles: • Genes vs Alleles
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Thanks for stopping by, today we are talking about dominant alleles versus recessive alleles.
If you don’t quite remember what an allele is, watch my video on genes vs alleles linked in the description.
Every organism has at least two alleles for every gene, two alleles for eye color, two alleles for horn size, etc, two alleles for every trait. In the simplest scenario, these alleles have a dominant/recessive relationship. This means this means that one form of the allele (the dominant) is expressed over the other form.
We often show this relationship using the alphabet, upper case letters refer to a dominant allele while lower case letters refer to the recessive allele.
So let’s look at an example:
Let’s say cat fur color can be orange or grey, orange being dominant and grey being recessive. The first thing we want to do is select a letter to represent the alleles. The letter you choose is not important so long as you can distinguish between the uppercase and lowercase. Let’s choose the letter “F” since we’re dealing with fur color. So in this example the big F would be dominant or orange, and the little f would be grey or recessive. There are three different pairings of these two alleles. You could have two dominant alleles, FF, in which case the fur is orange, you could have two recessive alleles, ff, in which case the fur is grey or you could have one of each, Ff, order does not matter. In this last case the fur would be orange, because the dominant trait is always expressed over the recessive.
That’s it for dominant vs recessive alleles. If you have any questions, throw them in the comments. Be sure to stay tuned for my next videos on homozygous vs heterozygous alleles and genotype vs phenotype.
Thanks for watching, we’ll catch you next time.