Really cool (wierd) genetic anamoly's

[commander bunnypants]

Wrap your head around this if you can.

Chimerism- In mythology a chimera is a fire-breathing monster composed of a lion's head, agoats body and a serpents tail. In medical science a chimera is an individual having more than one genetically-distinct population of cells that originated from more than than one zygote. = a person with two distinct genetic makeups.


DEMMAN

[trotsky]

1. Does this explain Karl Rove?

n/t

[DulceDecorum]

2. The serpent or the goat?

or the lyin' head?

[commander bunnypants]

3. Or Antrax Ann

Made up of little bits of man, women, freepers and a ugly toad


DEMMAN

[Festivito]

4. More common once thought.

A person can have a liver made with one set of cromosomes and a heart made of different set. Makes DNA testing a little more difficult, at least for negatives. It's a crap shoot as to which will occur inside the mouth.

Instead of becoming twins, the cells end up in different places. The parents have the additional cromosomes. Wierd world.

[thom1102]

5. They did a piece on this on Morning Edition on NPR this morning

It was really weird.

"I'm sorry ma'am, but your boys aren't your boys" "Funny, I seem to remember being there when it happened"

[Kolesar]

7. That was quite a story this morning!

[commander bunnypants]

8. That was where I heard it.

I goolged it and found out all sorts of interesting stuff


DDQM

[geniph]

6. I've met a cat who is a chimera

he's supposed to be genetically impossible. See, because of feline genetics, usually tri-color cats (what most people call calicos) are female, and the rare male tri-color is generally sterile. Also, the genes that cause dilution (red becomes cream and black becomes grey) are also sex-linked, so it's almost impossible for a male to be a dilute tricolor. There is one third improbability - you can't have one dilute color and one un-dilute color. Yet this cat, Solkatz Pretty Boy Floid, is the Red White and Blue cat, and fertile. His offspring exhibit the phenotype one would expect with a red and white father; it's been established by geneticists that he is a chimera, a male embryo fused with a female. Other than appearance, he is perfectly normal and healthy (and very sweet!).

There's an interesting page on the genetics of all this here:
http://www.messybeast.com/mosaicism.htm
excerpt:
Possibly the most famous tortoiseshell male cat is Solkatz Pretty Boy Floid, a pedigree Maine Coon, born Nov 1996 in Bremerton, Washington, USA. Floid is a triple genetic anomaly: calico male, mixed dilute and non-dilute colours and fertile! Floid was initially thought to be a dilute calico male (blue, cream and white) which in itself is unusual enough. However, the cream portions of his coat turned out to be red i.e a non-dilute colour. This is also very unusual as the dilution gene which gave him the blue (grey) colour should have converted all red portions into cream. Finally, Floid is fertile. Floid is a chimaera - the result of two fertilized eggs merging into a single embryo. On a genetic level, different portions of his coat (of his whole body in fact) actually belong to different cats. Although a very nice Maine Coon and the sire of some excellent offspring (none of which are dilute, therefore his testicular tissue is from non-dilute-carrying cells which also formed the red patches), Floid himself was unable to win titles because there are not colour classes for tortoiseshell male cats.

and this is Floid: