Have you ever wondered why brothers and sisters look similar but not the same? What decides whether one person has their mother’s nose, or their father’s eyebrows? How come some get male body parts, and others get female body parts? To begin to answer these questions, and understand what happens when sperm and egg meet, we need to learn a little bit about chromosomes.
Melissa Wilson Sayres never expected that her love for both math and biology would lead her to studying genetics and sex chromosomes. But the newest surprise in her work comes from finding out about some very colorful monsters.
Take a moment to consider how traits are passed from parent to offspring inside the cell. The information for the traits of an organism is stored in DNA, as genes on chromosomes. All living things have genes and chromosomes. Depending on the plant or animal, the size and number of chromosomes are different. Think of chromosomes as giant set of instructions for living things.
