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Diseases: Sex Linked and Sex Influenced

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Diseases: Sex Linked and Sex Influenced

by Richard Nixon
Honors Biology
Mrs. Linda
December 19, 1994

There are thousands of cases of sex linked and sex influenced diseases worldwide. These diseases can range from a social inconvenience, to a fatal ailment. In sex linked diseases, like Muscular Dystrophy, hemophilia and color blindness, only males are affected. When a man infected with a sex linked disease has children, all his sons are normal, but all of his daughters are carriers. When a carrier woman and an uninfected man have children, half of the sons are normal, and half of the sons are affected; half of the daughters are carriers and half of the daughters are normal. Only males are affected because the sex linked …show more content…

At this point, since the whole muscle was too large but was the only feasible solution, he decided to transplant whole muscles of a baby mouse into an adult mouse. This muscle was not damaged, because it was not minced, and it was not too large, because the baby muscle is considerably smaller than an adult muscle. Not only did the mouse survive, but normal function was restored to diseased adult muscle. Since the transplantation of muscle in mice was so successful, Dr. Law tried to find something along those lines that would work in a human. He found a solution; myoblasts. A myoblast is a mature muscle cell. It is a long thin fiber that can be more than an inch long. Unlike cells of other types, myoblasts have over
200 nuclei. When they are damaged, the myoblasts call upon a reservoir of satellite cells; small immature cells that nestle inside the muscle fiber's outer sheath. Satellite cells are the key to muscle repair and regeneration.The satellites leave the fiber, divide and then flatten into spindle shaped forms- the myoblasts. Myoblasts repair muscle cells by fusing with the injured cell and they share their nuclei with the injured cell's nuclei. When these two myoblasts fuse completely, new cells are formed. In 1970 Law thought of a procedure that would fuse healthy myoblasts with the dystrophic one, hoping that the resulting hybrid would have some function.
However,

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