Red-green color blindness inheritance pattern

The program finds out, what the chances are that your son or daughter will be red-green colorblind or may carry the colorblind genes.

Click on the flashing X-chromosomes for the result! (one option for the father, two for the mother,  green = normal, blue = defective X chromosome, CV = color vision)

Father

 X 

 Y 

Normal cv dad

Mother

 X 

 X 

Normal cv mom, not carrier

Son

 X 

 Y 

Normal cv son

Daughter

 X 

 X 

Normal cv daughter






Background

Color blindness is typically an inherited genetic disorder. It is most commonly inherited from mutations on the X chromosome, but the mapping of the human genome has shown there are many causative mutations – mutations capable of causing color blindness originate from at least 19 different chromosomes and 56 different genes.

Males are at a greater risk of inheriting an X linked mutation because males only have one X chromosome (XY, with the Y chromosome carrying altogether different genes from the X chromosome), and females have two (XX); if a woman inherits a normal X chromosome in addition to the one that carries the mutation, she will not display the mutation. Men do not have a second X chromosome to override the chromosome that carries the mutation. If 8% of variants of a given gene are defective, the probability of a single copy being defective is 8%, but the probability that two copies are both defective is (0.08)² = 0.0064 = 0.64%.

Gene therapy in the treatment of color blindness

Recently genetic research may open up exciting new perspectives toward curing color blindness. A group of researchers used gene therapy to enable dichromate monkeys to distinguish between red and green hues and creating trichromatic color vision for them. Neitz et al. injected a human protos gene with a viral vector vaccine behind the retinas of two male squirrel monkeys and later evaluated the color vision of the monkeys using a modified version of a standard Cambridge color blind test. After 20 weeks, the color vision of the monkeys improved dramatically, indicating that the color vision of the two monkeys moved in a trichromatic direction without noticeable side effects. The addition of the missing gene was thus sufficient to create full color vision without additional brain therapy, despite the fact that monkeys have been dichromate since birth. It can be a promising treatment in the future for those who have severe color blindness.

color blind test monkey

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