dominant gene
- noun
- /ˈdɒmɪnənt dʒiːn/
- Specialized
- The two institutes, with the aid of MAS, have introduced a dominant gene for resistance to CMD found in African cassava into Latin American cultivars, says Toenniessen, before their shipment to Africa.
- a single dominant gene
Examples
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When your dominant genes are from your minority parent, it is often assumed that you're only that minority; Caucasian genes just don't stand a chance most times.
Blog text (9) -
Far more likely, it seems, that in a population of 10,000 hominids, one individual was born with the mutation (assuming it was such) and, like a dominant gene, it spread through the population in subsequent generations.
Blog text (19) -
Look... that doesn't matter, and their dominant genes might not matter anymore, either.
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This suggests that the anomaly is also inherited via the X chromosome, but through a semi-dominant gene.
Blog text (2) -
So if we had more dominant genes than the Neanderthals, we simply outbred them since more Cro-Magnons would be born after each interbreeding episode.
Blog text (12) -
The results showed that different genotypes and cross combinations have dominant genes for different traits. That would be used to bridge the gap prevailing in pulse breeding against abiotic stress.
Academic text (2014) -
The resistance in PI 175111 was suggested to be controlled by a single dominant gene, which was later assigned the Ar gene symbol by Robinson et al. (1976).
Academic text (2018) -
The genotypes MN-92 and MN-51 were closest to the point of origin, thereby containing the highest number of dominant genes, while MN-98 contained a similar proportion of dominant and recessive genes.
Academic text (2014) -
A dominant gene can mask the effect of a recessive gene in an individual's phenotype.
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If a trait is controlled by a dominant gene, it will be expressed even if only one copy is present.
Antonyms
- Specialized
A part passed from parents that causes a feature only if two copies are present
How Much Effect
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'dominant' (stronger/overriding) + 'gene' (hereditary unit) yields a gene that overrides or determines a trait. This basic sense is cross-linguistically common and a B1 learner who knows the constituent words can infer the core meaning, though detailed genetic mechanics (e.g., masking a recessive allele when present in one copy) are specialist knowledge.
Etymology
Dominant gene can be remembered with a simple picture: imagine two people telling a story but one shouts while the other whispers. The dominant gene 'speaks' louder than the other gene, so its trait 'shows' in the child and the quieter gene is 'hidden' even if that other copy is present.