. A rare condition known as adermatoglyphia leads to such smooth fingertips that

Question

.   A rare condition known as adermatoglyphia leads to such smooth fingertips that the individual has no fingerprints. It has been dubbed the "immigration delay disease" because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. Recently the cause has been traced to a point mutation in the very first nucleotide of an intron. The allele with this mutation (F) is dominant to the wild type allele (f).   The condition also leads to less hand sweat than the average person and researchers think that the gene might help skin cells fold over one another early in fetal development.   A woman with adermatoglyphia marries a man with adermatoglyphia (assume both are heterozygous). Why might it be difficult to calculate the probability they will have a child with fingerprints. Consider the genotypes and phenotypes of all potential children and the possible contribution of the gene to early fetal development? (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3155166/ - Amer. J. Hum. Genet. 89, 302–307, 2011. You do not need to consult this reference but you should read a commentary on it http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/the-mystery-of-the-missing-fingerprints.html).

Explanation / Answer

maternal effect is a situation where the phenotype of an organism is determined not only by the environment it experiences and its genotype, but also by the environment and genotype of its mother. In genetics, maternal effects occur when an organism shows the phenotype expected from the genotype of the mother, irrespective of its own genotype, often due to the mother supplying mRNA or proteins to the egg. Maternal effects can also be caused by the maternal environment independent of genotype, sometimes controlling the size, sex, or behaviour of the offspring. These adaptive maternal effects lead to phenotypes of offspring that increase their fitness. Further, it introduces the concept of phenotypic plasticity, an important evolutionary concept. It has been proposed that maternal effects are important for the evolution of adaptive responses to environmental heterogeneity.

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