Can you get genes from your uncle

Siblings can and do have different DNA. You get genes from your two parents who got their genes from their two parents and so on. In short, no. The genes you inherit come from your parents whose DNA comes from their parents. It is certainly possible. Some children may be abnormally tall for their age from an early, rapid development of puberty or from an excess production of the growth hormone by the pituitary gland.

KQED is a proud member of. Always free. Sign In. KQED Inform. Save Article Save Article. Barry Starr. Nov 2, Failed to save article Please try again. Genetic tests are not perfect. Especially when dad is a chimera--a mix of two twins. Which led to the idea that he might be a chimera. A chimera starts out as fraternal twins. One set of 23 comes from mom and one set from dad for a total of 46 chromosomes.

When we have kids, we pass one from each pair down to each of them. This is why we share half our DNA with our moms and half with our dads. Once you get past mom and dad, though, things get a little less precise. This has to do with something that happens before we pass our DNA down to our kids—recombination.

Recombination is when DNA is swapped between two chromosomes in a pair. She gives you a mix of the two. Same thing with dad. Remember, what I am describing happens for all 23 pairs.

Well actually only 22 pairs in men. The first thing you probably notice is how different the DNA is between child 1 and child 2. The top and bottom are from the blue one and the middle is from the red one. For child 2 the chromosome from mom is a different mix. It is red at the top with most of the rest being blue. There is a sliver of red at the bottom.

I have lined up the chromosomes from each parent to hopefully make it easier to see how much DNA the two siblings share:. One thing was clear: it better be for a good reason. Mammalian males go through the bother of actually tagging the mitochondria in their sperm so that it is easier to destroy them after the egg has been fertilised. In plants too, the mitochondria from one parent are actively destroyed, this time before fertilisation takes place. The idea is that mtDNA replicates independently within the cell, so the number of copies increases over time.

And the more copies there are, the more likely some will be transmitted to the daughter cell when that cell divides. If all mtDNA comes from one parent only, then mtDNA within a cell are closely related to each other, as they are all clones. Hence, there is not much scope for competition, as copies of the mitochondrial genomes are basically competing with exact copies of themselves. But imagine what could happen if organelles were derived from both parents, the four grandparents, and so on ad infinitum.

This would set the scene for a genetically variable population of organelles in every cell. And this could be bad news as now different clonal lineages of mtDNA are competing with each other. The faster mtDNA replicates, the more copies it produces and the more likely it will spread to the next generation of cells.