Mitochondrial DNA is largely employed in phylogeny and evolutionary studies because it has a high mutation rate, maternal inheritance, high number of copies, and intraspecific polymorphisms [ 47].
In addition to the continuous transfer of genetic material to the subsequent generations by means of inheritance, a number of examples are known where genes are transferred across species borders.
Whole genome analysis yielded no novel inherited copy number variants strengthening the case for a simple inheritance pattern.
The dominant inheritance pattern and number of meioses predict that ∼3% of the diploid genome plus the mutation is likely to be shared among affected family members (0.5∧5).
In fact, although studies in inheritance of vertebral number have been conducted in several species (see Discussion), many of these have used methods that do not allow additive genetic effects to be distinguished from maternal, early environmental and non-additive genetic effects.
Inherited, apparently benign CNVs can in some cases cause disease, depending on copy number, inheritance pattern or genetic and environmental background.
Triple A syndrome (Allgrove syndrome, online mendelian inheritance in man number 231550) is a rare autosomal recessive disease characterized by alacrima, achalasia of the esophageal cardia, and adrenal failure (1, 2).
Several weedy relatives of C. tinctorius have been studied and hybrids between these relatives and safflower have been used to study the inheritance of a number of domestication traits [ 32, 33].
Given the different genomic inheritance and low number of genes encoded in the chloroplast, it is unfortunately difficult to directly compare the evolutionary patterns observed for photosynthetic plastid genes in this study with the strong purifying selection identified for nuclear-encoded photosynthetic genes of C. resedifolia [ 22].
We have previously established a heme-deficient zebrafish that is homozygous for a mutation in uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase (urod; also known as yquem) as a model for studying human hepatoerythropoietic porphyria (HEP) (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man number 176100) and heme deficiency pathogenesis (Wang et al., 1998).
