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Inheritance

Can two brown-eyed parents have a blue-eyed child?

Asked by Aman B.4.4k views1 answer
AM
Arjun Mehta
PhD candidate in population genetics, IISc

Yes, easily. The school version of eye colour genetics is one of the most oversimplified things still taught.

The textbook story - brown is dominant, blue is recessive, two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child only if both are heterozygous carriers - is roughly right but misses most of the action.

Eye colour is actually polygenic. At least 16 genes are known to contribute, with OCA2 and HERC2 doing most of the work, but TYR, IRF4, SLC24A4, and several others all kick in. A person's eye colour is the result of many variants combining, and the outcome isn't a clean dominant/recessive split.

In practice: two brown-eyed parents can absolutely have a blue-eyed child if both carry the right combination of variants - and this happens fairly often. It can also happen if one parent's brown eyes are due to one set of variants and the other parent's brown eyes are due to a different set, and the child happens to inherit a combination that produces low melanin in the iris.

The reverse - two blue-eyed parents having a brown-eyed child - is rarer but also possible, for similar reasons.

If your Class 10 biology textbook claimed otherwise, your textbook was using a 60-year-old model.

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