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Asked by to Dave, Ditte on 27 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Dave Baker answered on 27 Jun 2014:
Ok, it comes down to how many copies of a gene you have. Humans have 2 so it’s easy, almost you could say that each version of a gene is called an allele. Sometimes it’s dominant sometime recessive. Things like wheat have a lot of allelic variation due to how many copies of the genes, sometimes 6 copies!
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Ditte Hedegaard answered on 27 Jun 2014:
The number of allels refers to how many copies of the same gene you have. As Ben says, humans have 2. One of them has come from the dad and the other from the mum. Usually we don’t need both of the genes to be activated, so one is often silenced and the other one activate or the activation of one gene is dominating over the other one. This is seen for example seen for eye color. The gene for brown eye color will dominate over the blue eye colour. So if you have one parent with blue eyes and one with brown, then you are more likely to have brown eyes. Because we all have 2 allels, people with brown eyes might have the gene for both brown and blue eyes, but will only pass on the blue eye genes to their child, that means that child will have blue eyes even though both the parents have brown eyes.
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