A recent study found that at least 180 different genes seem to be correlated with height in humans, which is partly why height seems to be a continuous trait. If we imagine a much simpler scenario in which only 10 genes control height, and each of these genes displays simple Mendelian inheritance (i.e., there are only two alleles, tall and short, and tall is dominant to short) and shows equal contribution to height, how many different possible genetic height phenotypes would there be in humans?

Question

A recent study found that at least 180 different genes seem to be correlated with height in humans, which is partly why height seems to be a continuous trait. If we imagine a much simpler scenario in which only 10 genes control height, and each of these genes displays simple Mendelian inheritance (i.e., there are only two alleles, tall and short, and tall is dominant to short) and shows equal contribution to height, how many different possible genetic height phenotypes would there be in humans?

2,11,20,30
which number

Answer 1

would there be?

There would be 11 different possible genetic height phenotypes in humans.

This is because each of the 10 genes can have 2 alleles (tall or short), and since each gene contributes equally to height, there are 2^10 = 1024 different combinations of alleles. However, since tall is dominant to short, there would be 11 different combinations that result in a tall phenotype (all tall alleles, with 0 to 10 short alleles).