Sex
Relationship between Sex and Heredity
There are three important points
to keep clear in the relationship between sex and heredity.
- Sex-limited Traits Refer to traits that are found only in one sex.
- Hen-feathered vs Cock-feathered: Cock-feathering is limited to
males .
- Milk production in dairy animals is limited to females (cows).
- Selection for high milk yield is compounded because you have more selective
force in the males but it is hard to measure the milk yield in bulls.
How would you select for high yielding dairy animals?
- Egg production is limited to females.
- How would you select for high yielding chickens?
Why are there significant differences from the cows?
- There are other obvious sex-limited characters that I will leave to
your curiosity.
- Sex-influenced Traits refer to traits that are expressed in both sexes
but the mode of expression is different in one sex.
- Pattern Baldness is the
classic example where the trait or gene is dominant in males and recessive
in females.
- Sex-linked Traits refer to traits that are on the same chromosomes as
the sex determining genes.
{Ref}
This web site is provided for instruction
in Botany and Zoology 342
by Kenneth G. Wilson,
Professor of Botany
Miami University
wilsonkg@muohio.edu
