A study on laboratory mice from the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine finds that mammals tend to exhibit more of their father’s DNA. Even though genes are inherited equally from both the mother and the father, the expression is found to be more dominant in paternal genes.
The study propagated three diverse inbred strains of mice together. The hybrid offspring were then examined to determine the level of gene expression exhibited from each parent. The study observed that genes inherited from the father were expressed in a larger amount than maternal genes.
This finding is important because deleterious mutations will have a much larger effect if inherited from the father than from the mother, as they will be expressed in a much greater amount. In the words of Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena, author of the study paper, “This is an exceptional new research finding that opens the door to an entirely new area of exploration in human genetics.”
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I found this discovery to be extremely interesting as this new information may be applied to human genetics as well. If paternal genes are more dominant on offspring that maternal in mammals this may be true in humans as well, but maybe to a lesser degree.
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