Thanks for the correction! It's been a long time since high school bio (my teacher was a bit nuts, but that's another story) and I got complacent with my sources. Since I've been learning adobe illustrator/photoshop anyway, I'll try to put together a more accurate genetics graphic for the future.Originally Posted by paulh
I've seen this or similar explanation on several web sites. It is one of the examples of really wrong information to be found on the web.
If you think about a DNA strand as a curled ladder, a gene is a bunch of rungs of the ladder. Each gene has its own locus (location, where the gene resides). There is one strand of DNA per chromosome. Chromosomes come in pairs. Each chromosome in the pair has the same set of loci (plural of locus). In other words, a mojave gene can be in the DNA of one chromosome of the gene pair, while a lesser gene is in the same location in the DNA of the other chromosome.
Any decent high school biology text has this information. The USA National Institute of Health has a genetics home reference pdf with good information, too.
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook
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