Both terms refer to one organism with two or more distinct populations of cells * – but they are not interchangeable. The different cell lines in chimeras originally come from different zygotes whereas mosaics arise from the same zygote. Because mosaics start with the same genome, you expect them to be more similar than chimeras […]
Mammalian X inactivation
In humans, males are 46XY and females are 46XX. The Y chromosome has been in the news recently but we’re more concerned about the X chromosome today. You’ll notice that there are two copies of the X in human females – do we have double the X gene products? No, X inactivation silences most but […]