Factors Affecting Gene Expression

Penetrance is how often a gene is expressed. It is defined as the percentage of people who have the gene and who develop the corresponding phenotype ( Professional.Fig. # Penetrance and expressivity Penetrance and expressivity ). A gene with incomplete (low) penetrance may not be expressed even when the trait is dominant or when it is recessive and the gene responsible for that trait is present on both chromosomes. Penetrance of the same gene may vary from person to person and may depend on a person’s age. Even when an abnormal allele is not expressed (nonpenetrance), the unaffected carrier of the abnormal allele is able to pass it to their children, who may have the clinical abnormality. In such cases, the pedigree appears to skip a generation. However, some cases of apparent nonpenetrance are due to the examiner’s unfamiliarity with or inability to recognize minor manifestations of the disorder. Patients with minimal expression are sometimes considered to have a forme fruste of the disorder.

Expressivity is the extent to which a gene is expressed in a single person. It can be graded as a percentage; eg, when a gene has 50% expressivity, only half the features are present or the severity is only half of what can occur with full expression. Expressivity may be influenced by the environment and by other genes, so people with the same gene may vary in phenotype. Expressivity can vary even among members of the same family.

A trait that appears in only one sex is called sex-limited. Sex-limited inheritance is distinct from X-linked inheritance, which refers to traits carried on the X chromosome. Sex-limited inheritance, perhaps more correctly called sex-influenced inheritance, refers to special cases in which sex hormones and other physiologic differences between males and females alter the expressivity and penetrance of a gene. For example, premature baldness (known as male-pattern baldness) is an autosomal dominant trait, but such baldness is rarely expressed in females and then usually only after menopause.

Genomic imprinting is the differential expression of genetic material depending on whether it has been inherited from the father or mother. For most autosomes, both the parental and maternal alleles are expressed. However, in < 1% of alleles, expression is possible only from the paternal or maternal allele. For example, expression of the gene for insulin-like growth factor 2 is normally expressed only from the paternal allele.

Genomic imprinting is usually determined by effects that occur normally in the development of gametes. Changes such as methylation of DNA may cause certain maternal or paternal alleles to be expressed to different degrees. A disorder may appear to skip a generation if genomic imprinting prevents the causative allele from being expressed. Defective imprinting, such as abnormal activation or silencing of alleles, can result in clinical disorders (eg, Prader-Willi syndrome Secondary hypogonadism , Angelman syndrome).

Codominant alleles are both observed. Thus, the phenotype of heterozygotes is distinct from that of either homozygote. For example, if a person has one allele coding for blood type A and one allele coding for blood type B, the person has both blood types (blood type AB).

(See also Lyon hypothesis (X-inactivation) Lyon hypothesis (X-inactivation) Sex chromosome anomalies may involve aneuploidy, partial deletions or duplications of sex chromosomes, or mosaicism. (See also Overview of Chromosomal Anomalies.) Sex chromosome anomalies are... read more .)

In females, who have 2 (or, with sex chromosomal abnormalities, > 2) X chromosomes (except in eggs), all but one of the X chromosomes is inactivated; ie, most of the alleles on that chromosome are not expressed. Which chromosome is inactivated is determined randomly individually in each cell early in fetal life; sometimes it is the X from the mother that is inactivated, and sometimes it is the X from the father. Sometimes most of the X chromosome inactivation comes from one parent—called skewed X inactivation. Either way, once inactivation has taken place in a cell, all descendants of that cell have the same X inactivation.

However, some alleles on the inactive X chromosome do express. Many of these alleles are on chromosomal regions corresponding to regions of the Y chromosomes (and are thus called pseudoautosomal regions because both males and females receive 2 copies of these regions).