Inheritance

We’ve been playing around with 23andme some more. We now have my mother’s data. That lets us look at more detail of what genes come from which side of the family. For example, if we compare Peter to my mother, we get something that looks like this:

but if we compare Tom’s DNA to hers, we get this:

Notice that Peter inherited big sections of chromosomes 2 and 21 from her, but Tom didn’t get any of those from her. Those red markers on chromosome 6 are showing the location of several genes related to the immune system (e.g. HLA-A, HLA-B, etc.). We can look at a traditional inheritance tree for those genes like this:

See that all of Peter’s genes in that area either came from my father or from Chris’ side of the family.

While all of Tom’s HLA genes from my side of the family came from my mother. 23andme’s tools will let you map out predefined groups like this, or type in lists of genes.

Isn’t that neat?