What is the difference between recessive and dominant alleles

Alleles are different versions of a gene. Every person has two alleles for each gene one from either parent. For example, the gene which determines eye colour can either have an allele for brown eyes or an allele for blue eyes, an individual can have two alleles of each or one of both. Alleles can either be classed as Dominant or recessive. Both genes and alleles are responsible for inheritance. An allele in a slightly varied form of a gene. A gene is inherited in pairs, one from each parent.

When the copy of one gene differs slightly from another, it becomes an allele. Alleles sometime cause observable changes in the genetic make-up of an organism. Such changes are called Phenotypic changes. Such changes normally happen due in the presence of dominant and recessive alleles. A dominant allele is the one that expresses itself by overriding the other allele.

A recessive allele would be the one that that gets overridden in the presence of a dominant allele. Genetic expression is dependent on such alleles. They may be more than two alleles for a given gene. Usually, only two are present at a given time, however, occasionally they might act in a collective fashion.

Some characters like the human eye color are controlled by two dominant alleles and one recessive allele. The majority of the people have brown color eyes and that is the recessive character. Fewer people have either blue color or green color eyes, but that is the dominant character.

Dominant allele determines the dominant character. Recessive allele determines the recessive character. In the F 1 generation, the dominant character is expressed although both the dominant and recessive alleles are present in the individuals.

Most of the time the dominant character is frequently found in the population than the recessive character ratio. Sometimes the recessive character is frequent than the dominant character due to the high frequency of recessive allele in the population. Most of the time the dominant allele determines the superior character. If you have any other comments or suggestions, please let us know at comment yourgenome. Can you spare minutes to tell us what you think of this website?

Open survey. In: Facts In the Cell. Since human cells carry two copies of each chromosome they have two versions of each gene. These different versions of a gene are called alleles. Alleles can be either dominant or recessive. Dominant alleles show their effect even if the individual only has one copy of the allele also known as being heterozygous.

For example, the allele for brown eyes is dominant, therefore you only need one copy of the 'brown eye' allele to have brown eyes although, with two copies you will still have brown eyes. If both alleles are dominant, it is called codominance.