Final answer:
Inheritance of hemochromatosis, an autosomal recessive disorder, for children of carrier parents involves a 25% chance of being affected, a 50% chance of being a carrier, and a 25% chance of neither being affected nor being a carrier.
Step-by-step explanation:
Probability of Inheriting Hemochromatosis
Hemochromatosis is a hereditary disease characterized by an excessive accumulation of iron in the body, which can lead to various health problems such as liver damage. This condition is an example of an autosomal recessive genetic disorder, meaning that a person must inherit two copies of the defective gene, one from each parent, in order to express the disease phenotype.
When two carriers of an autosomal recessive trait have children, there is a 25% chance that any given child will inherit the disease (two disease alleles), a 50% chance that a child will be a carrier (one disease allele), and a 25% chance that the child will inherit neither disease allele and thus not be a carrier.
Given that both the woman and her husband in this scenario are carriers, each of their children has the following probabilities:
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- 25% chance of being affected with hemochromatosis
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- 50% chance of being a carrier like their parents, without showing symptoms of the disease
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- 25% chance of not being a carrier and not being affected by the disease
It is important to understand that these probabilities are independent for each child, meaning that the outcomes for one child do not affect the probabilities for the next child.