When looking around, a majority of people have black or brown hair. Then there are people with blonde hair, and finally the color you see the least, are those with red hair. What if you could have the chance to tell if your future child would have red hair, would you?
BritainsDNA, is a British company
that can test your genes and in fact tell you if your child will inherit the
red hair color gene. Both parents would have their tested to look for the gene
MC1R, that causes people to have red hair. This is done by a saliva test in
order to find out if one or both of the parents are carriers of any variation of the MC1R gene. From simple genetics, since they
are testing if the parents are carriers, the MC1R gene from both parents would
need to be passed down to the child, as it is a recessive gene. But even so,
this does not mean that the child would automatically have red hair. This would
just mean that there is a 1 in 4 chance of having red hair.
The population of people with red
hair is just over 0.5 percent, worldwide. This means that people with red hair
are very rare, about 1 in 200 people rare. In other words, that is
approximately 40 million people in the world! If you have a red headed friend, you might
want to tell them how special they are! And if you don not, would you be
interested if you have the possibility of having a red haired child?
Posted by Cynthia Bui (1)
I read in an article that in some years there will be a "redhead extinction". Since you stated that the gene for red hair is a recessive gene, is this extinction possible or do you think just fewer people will have red hair, but can still potentially pass on the gene to their offspring?
ReplyDeleteKimberly Ty (3)
Honestly, I have no clue. "Redhead extinction" sounds pretty interesting, I never thought something like that was possible, but then again I never thought of it!
DeleteCynthia Bui (1)
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in what you think about this type of DNA testing, especially when done by parents to select for or against certain characteristics in their children. Obviously it is very important in the case of genetic diseases to prevent transmission of harmful alleles. However, do you think there will be societal repercussions as parents have more of an ability to predict (and eventually maybe even control) which genes and characteristics their children inherent from them?
ReplyDeletePosted by Sean McDougall
I think it is interesting to know that this sort of technological/medical advances are out there. However, I do feel that there might be some societal repercussions, because people will want to know what hair color their child will have, and if it is not to their liking, that may be bad. Also, where is the surprise and fun in knowing what color the hair will be before the child is born?!
DeleteCynthia Bui (1)
Its great to see geneticists finding out about the human genome as it helps us understand how people can develop. It's weird to think that in the future parents could have the option to choose the color of their child's hair.
ReplyDeletePosted by Poya Jafari
I agree! Understanding the genome completely, I think would be something pretty amazing. Think of all the advances we could make, and procedures that could possibly be done to save people!
DeleteCynthia Bui (1)