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If a person reproduced with their opposite sex clone, would the resulting child also be a clone?

  • So the scenario goes like this: there's a person, and then there's their clone whose genetic makeup is identical to the original person, except that the clone is of the opposite sex. If they reproduced, then wouldn't the resulting child have identical DNA to their parent(s)? If that's the case, then can the child be considered a clone as well? If that's not the case, why?

  • Answer:

    Strictly speaking, clones could not be of the opposite sex.  Clones share all of their DNA; if two people are of the opposite sex, one would have two X chromosomes while the other has one X and one Y.  However, you could get very close to clones if the female "clone" has two copies of the male's X chromosome.  The only genetic difference would be that the male has a Y chromosome that the female does not. Proceeding with the answer from this point, the offspring would not be genetically identical to the clone parents.  You have two copies of each of your genes: one from each parent.  If your two copies are exactly the same, you are homozygous for that gene; if you have two slightly different versions, you are heterozygous for that gene.  Let's say that a certain gene has alleles (gene versions) "A" and "a" for a certain gene.  If the clone parents are homozygous (they have "AA" or "aa"), then their offspring would be the same for that gene.  However, if the clone parents are heterozygous (they have "Aa"), the baby could have "AA", "Aa", or "aa".  In other words, the baby of the "clones" could be different from the parents at the genes where the parents are heterozygous.  This baby would not be a clone.  The one circumstance in which the offspring would be genetically identical to the "clone" parents would be if the parents were homozygous at every single gene. Interestingly enough, in nature, there are examples of organisms reproducing sexually with themselves to produce genetically different offspring (which amounts to the same situation as this hypothetical question).  For instance, many flowering plants have both male and female parts and are capable of self-pollination.  As described in the previous paragraph, they can be genetically different from the parent.  Also, certain animals such as Komodo dragons can do something called parthenogenesis.  This is when the female has genetically different offspring using only her own DNA.  Because the sex-determination system is different in Komodo dragons (males have two Z chromosomes; females have a Z and a W), a female can produce male offspring through parthenogenesis.

Kyle Smith at Quora Visit the source

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Your genes consist of pairs, only half of which are shared with your off spring. Which half of each gene pair is shared is random. Since the gene pairs of your clone would also be shared randomly, the resulting mixture would only result in a full set of identical pairs through astronomically low odds.

Todd Gardiner

No it's not a clone.  But you would have an inbred.  It would probably not survive due to inbreeding depression. An equivalent phenomenon occurs regularly in many plants (which can overcome inbreeding depression).  The most important crops are actually self-pollinated.  Legumes (soybeans, beans, peanuts), small grains (wheat, oats, barley, rye), and rice are all self-pollinated.  Others like tomatoes and cotton are also mostly self-pollinating. These crop plants are released as fully inbred seeds, which are effectively "clones."  But that terminology is reserved for clonal propagation, usually from vegetative tissues (potatoes and many tree fruits being a good example).

Justin Ma

It would theoretically be possible to produce a clone in such a way, but it would be extremely unlikely for such a thing to occur. In fact the odds would be 1 in 1,388,608, due to the human genome being diploid. To explain more fully; your genome consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes (46 in total). When you reproduce you pass on just one of each of these pairs of chromosomes to your offspring, and the other comes from the other parent. So let's look at your genome and the genome of your identical clone (of the opposite gender) with whom you wish to produce a clone child. We'll ignore the difficulty of the sex chromosomes for the moment and just look at chromosome 1. You have two copies of chromosome 1 in your genome, which we will call A and B, giving you the genotype AB. Your opposite gender clone also has the genotype AB. When the two of you breed you produce a simple punnet square of possible outcomes: An A from you and an A from your clone produces a child with genotype AA. An A from you and a B from your clone produces a child with genotype AB. A B from you and an A from your clone produces a child with genotype AB. A B from you and a B from your clone producess a child with genotype BB. Put more simply you would produce a child with the same AB genotype as yourself only half the time (ignoring the very rare chance of trisomy occuring). These odds would then have to be repeated for every one of the 23 chromosome pairs in your genome, making the odds of you producing a clone of yourself by mating with yourself 1 in 2^23 = 1 in 1,388,608.

Karl Hudspith

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