Very occasionally, a female’s X chromosomes are not recombined and just one of her copies of the chromosome is passed down “intact” to her offspring. This means that the “new” X chromosome passed down to the daughter is basically made up of pieces from both of her X chromosomes. One other important note related to X DNA inheritance is that when a female passes the X chromosome to her male or female offspring, the chromosome is almost always “recombined” with her other X chromosome to make a brand-new, unique copy. The difference is that there is a special pattern of inheritance for X DNA.įor example, you might have noticed that females get X DNA from both their mother and father, while males only get X DNA from their mother. Just like with autosomal DNA, we can share DNA segments on the X chromosome that match our relatives. Since every male as an X and a Y chromosome, and every woman has two X chromosomes, you can see how their kids can only be either X and Y or X and X. If the child gets an X and a Y, then the baby’s biological gender is male. If the offspring of a couple gets two X chromosomes, then the baby’s biological gender is female. The sex chromosome determines whether the child is a male or a female. That’s right, one copy of every single numbered chromosome and one copy of the sex chromosome from both our mother and father. We get one copy of each chromosome from each of our parents. X DNA is special, and it’s in our sex chromosome. Most of the time when we talk about DNA, we are talking about autosomal DNA which is contained within our numbered chromosomes.

On each chromosome, we have two “copies”, one that we received from each of our parents. We all have 22 numbered chromosomes and one chromosome that determines our biological gender. X-DNA can be a little tricky, and so it does start to roam into the more “intermediate” of topics, but it’s still important to understand the basics about this very unique aspect of our DNA. I try to make sure to address topics on this site that can be easily understood by beginners.

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