Color blindness is the most common genetic disorder, which affects almost one in every ten males. Color vision deficiency is a decreased ability to distinguish colors and, in some cases, may be an acquired disease. However, the majority of people have it as an inherited problem. In this condition, one or more of three cone cells in the eye fail to develop and are not able to distinguish color. Color blindness threatens male humans more frequently than female ones because the X chromosome mutation is the main reason for color blindness. Females have paired X chromosomes, and therefore, the first chromosome offsets the defect of the second.
Nevertheless, color blindness genes may be carried by the non-color-blind female and transferred to future generations (Bergendahl et al, 2019). Having a single X chromosome increases the risk for males as they will always have the genetic disease if the recessive gene is passed.
Inherited color blindness includes three different varieties: anomalous trichromacy, dichromacy and monochromacy. Two most prevalent forms of inherited color vision deficiencies are protanomaly and deuteranomaly, both of which are known as red-green color blindness and effect about 8% of human males and 0,6% of females (Seager et al., 2018). Depending on the mutation, inherited color blindness may be congenital or may reveal itself in childhood or adulthood.
The disease is not caused by a flaw in DNA transcription or translation as the parent chromosome already contains a deficiency which is transmitted to the child (Seager et al., 2018). Color vision deficiencies may be caused by deficient gene expression, which leads to an incorrect process of protein production, which, in turn, results in malformation of cone cells.
Question: Could you tell more about the process of genetically engineered substances production, such as human insulin?
References
Bergendahl, L. T., Gerasimavicius, L., Miles, J., Macdonald, L., Wells, J. N., Welburn, J. P., & Marsh, J. A. (2019). The role of protein complexes in human genetic disease. Protein Science, 28(8), 1400-1411. Web.
Seager, S. L., & Slabaugh, M. R., & Hansen, M. S. (2018). Chemistry for today: General, organic, and biochemistry (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.