• Question: If someone's dad had green eyes and their mum had brown what colour would the child have?

    Asked by lanacrow20 to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 20 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      You get brown eyes if you have plenty of a pigment protein in your iris and lighter coloured eyes if you don’t have so much. As to blue/green/hazel, it turns out it’s more complicated than just a single gene:

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6195091.stm

      With one parent with brown eyes and one with green, you could have brown eyes or green, or maybe blue or even hazel! It all depends on the exact combination of DNA sequences that you end up with. My parents both have blue eyes but mine are green. My Mum’s parents both had brown eyes!

    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      Eye colour is typically inherited in a mendelian fashion. Brown eyes are dominant (that is when there is a brown allele present it overpowers the green allele -oversimplified explanation there). It would also depend on the eye colour of the mum and dads parents. There are many possibilites, brown being most likely, green is possible, even blue!!! Yes blue – blue is recessive which means that each parent has to give a blue allele for the eyes to be blue. If the brown eyed mum was Brown with a blue allele (rember brown is dominant), and the second alele in the green was blue) the every one out of four children the parents had would (statistically) have blue eyes.

      Genetics is crazy sometimes

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