Cheating Chromosomes Vault Past Competitors to Reach Egg Cell First

Anyone who studies biology at school or college will learn that haploid gametes produced from a diploid cell will each contain just one of the two copies of a gene inherited from mother and father. This basic Law of Segregation was first proposed by the pea-breeding Austrian monk Gregor Mendel back in the 1860s, and assumes that allele segregation is random.Studies by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have now shown how, during female gamete formation, certain genes, or “selfish