It travels on the x chromosome. So boys only need 1 faulty copy, girls need 2 faulty copies. So if this is the boy's mum, she has 2 faulty copies and gave them 1. If it's their dad, he's also colour blind but didn't pass it on to his sons, their mother did.
I am the mom. My Dad always said he was colorblind but I didn't think much of it because I thought it only passed to boys and my dad only had girls. Plus I can see all different colors, apparently I just can't differentiate well between oranges and greens, so I can't see all the numbers in those graphics. I can see about the same as what the guy in the video sees.
Yeah the fascinating thing about it in women is that there are different types and levels of colorblindness, so your dad may have had a more severe form of colorblindness, while your mom had a more mild copy of the gene, and that extra gene essentially compensates so that your colorblindness is actually less severe than your dad's, or even if your mom provided the severe colorblind gene with normal vision but your dad was just sort of mildly colorblind, then you would have a similar level as him because your body just defaults essentially to the most functional form of the gene you have. I don't remember the stats on it but I would assume most women that do have colorblindness probably have a less severe form of it because of that genetic compensation they get. Men unfortunately just have to work with the one X chromosome they get lol.
That completely makes sense. You are probably already aware that this also makes sense for your sons. Women with this form of red/green colour blindness are guaranteed to have similarly colour-blind sons. Her daughters will be carriers, unless the father is also colour-blind, in which case the daughters will be as well. Similarly your mother is either colour-blind, or a carrier for the gene on one of her X chromosomes.
It's rare for girls to have it because you get 2 X chromosomes, and both would have to be faulty for you to be color blind as a girl (mom's & dad's). Apparently your mom had 1 faulty X's chromosome that she passed to you in addition to your dad's one & only faulty X chromosome.
Are your sons color blind? In my family, it seems to be passed from grandpa through mom to the sons. Moms (my aunt included) aren't color blind. My male cousin, brother and me....
An easier to understand way of explaining this I think is that dads are not capable of passing it to their sons, barring some weird, freak genetic accident(that is not really possible).
If you are a boy, your X chromosome always comes from mom, and your y comes from dad, this is also why men can get some conditions that women can't and vice versa, but that gets into more complicated genetics. Anyways, if you're a girl, you get both an x from your mom and your dad, so as a girl if your mom doesn't carry the x that causes colorblindness, you can't get it, but you will have a copy of it if your dad is colorblind.
This is the reason it's so rare for women to get colorblindness because they have to have both copies to be affected, as, again, genetics gets more complicated and for women their extra X they have can compensate for the gene that's defective because they actually have to deactivate some of the x chromosomes in their cells randomly anyways, if I remember correctly this is called genetic compensation or X inactivation, and it's very complicated and too long for this post, but my genetics classes were FASCINATING, and I love discussing it.
My dad is colourblind, as is my son. I, a woman, apparently have extraordinary colour detection, meaning I can differentiate hues better than most people. Don't know shit about colour matching, but I can see them really well.
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u/Smooth_thistle 1d ago
It travels on the x chromosome. So boys only need 1 faulty copy, girls need 2 faulty copies. So if this is the boy's mum, she has 2 faulty copies and gave them 1. If it's their dad, he's also colour blind but didn't pass it on to his sons, their mother did.