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Title: Explain what loss of heterozygosity is... Post by: theplumpit2 on May 20, 2015 Help, can anyone help explain what loss of heterozygosity is? Thanks in advance!
Title: Explain what loss of heterozygosity is... Post by: ilike2eattt on May 20, 2015 Loss of Heterozygosity is when (in a diploid organism) one allele of a particular gene becomes lost, and then the single remaining gene somehow becomes defective/mutant. Then the expression for this affected gene becomes lost. The prime example of this would be retinoblastoma, where one can get retinal cancer...
I'm hoping one of the administrators can help chime in on this.. Title: Explain what loss of heterozygosity is... Post by: bio_man on May 20, 2015 You haven't posted a question, confused on what you need...
Title: Explain what loss of heterozygosity is... Post by: duddy on May 20, 2015 Imagine we have some organism where having phenotype aa makes organisms more able to deal with heat but less with cold, while Aa and AA deal better with cold but not with heat.
If we have a popultion with AA and Aa and the temperature goes up, all of a sudden more of the aa organisms will survive compared to the AA and Aa organisms, but there will be enough aa organisms (produced by the Aa and the aa organisms) that the population will continue to exist. If the temperature swings back to cold after a long time, because of the Aa and AA guys dying out, the aa won't have a mutation around so that their offspring will be able to deal with cold. If there is heterozygosity, there is a wider range in possible offspring. A wider range in possible offspring means a wider range of conditions that offspring can survive in, usually. |