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in reply to The state of my vision

My vision is seriously messed up. From a genetic standpoint that is. My father is much like you people, and cannot see much of anything without glasses. My mother uses contacts, and could get around without them, but not very safely. Both sets of grandparents have really bad eyes too. My brother and I have near perfect vision (Don't know the numbers). Does anyone know which side gives out the sight genes, and how all sorts of rotten genes could produce this?

~W

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RE: RE: The state of my vision
by extremely (Priest) on Oct 19, 2000 at 12:36 UTC
    Neither eyesight or eyecolor are sex-linked. No help there I'm afraid. The only sex-linked vision problem I've heard about is chromatic, i.e. color-blindness. One or two of the color-blindness forms seem to be at least partially based on the X having a regressive that your Y can't block because the branch that expresses that blocking gene is missing.

    --
    $you = new YOU;
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      What?

      While I do *have* red-green colour-blindness, that is hardly my defining characteristic.

      At least you didn't capitalize it, though. :)

        Oh man you have no idea the internal struggle I went thru to not bracket your name when typing that post =P I left the post window open for a minute while I fought the impulse...

        --
        $you = new YOU;
        honk() if $you->love(perl)

      You're right - red-green color blindness is a flaw in a gene on the X chromosome. This is why there are so many men with the condition but so few women. A woman has two X chromosomes, and so would have to get two flawed copies of the gene.

      Men only get one chance.

      Let's hear it for redundancy!

      Vision can vary greatly amoung family members because much of vision quality is environmental. Not to say that genetics aren't important. Unfortunately, vision degrades when you abuse it. But happily, contacts aren't that bad. {grin}