Cystic fibrosis is recessive meaning that both parents must have at least one cystic fibrosis allele. Another autosomal disease is called Huntington Disease. This is a degenerative disease that degrades the nervous system and leads to the breakdown of nerve cells in the brain. This leads to mental deterioration and eventually death. Huntington disease is an autosomal dominant disease meaning that the chances of being passed down are about 50% meaning that it has a fairly high transmission rate. Another autosomal adisease is called sickle cell disease which is a mutation in DNA that causes hemoglobin to not be produced meaning that the red blood cells have a shrunken shape and they don’t carry oxygen as well. Sickle cell disorder is a recessive disease with incomplete dominance, which means that if an organism has at least one allele of the sickle cell disease the will show some symptoms of it, but if they have both alleles of the disease it will be much more serious. An example of a disease that is sex-linked (linked to the X chromosomes) is hemophilia. Hemophilia is when the body fails to produce a protein that is required for the production of a protein that clots blood when someone gets a …show more content…
“A pedigree is a chart, or family tree, that traces the inheritance of a trait.” A pedigree shows genotype and phenotype as well as other information regarding the inheritance and carrying of different traits throughout several generations. This information relates to previous information in that I already had the basic level of understanding that some diseases could be inherited genetically, but what is new to me (as well as what interests) me is the fact that the environment and conditioning of your body have a lot to do with the genes that are expressed (in this case diseases). What I also found interesting was that, genetic diseases can be caused by mutations on BOTH autosomal and sexual chromosomes and that the chromosome that they are carried on determines exactly what the disease is and the problems that is causes. This information is critical to understand because it is the basis of understanding how genetic disorders are spread from generation to generation and by understanding this information we can also learn how to prevent many kinds of diseases (such as limiting sunlight if skin cancer runs in the