Allele

Imagine your body is built with LEGOs. Alleles are like different colored LEGOs that tell your body what to do! They are super small instructions found in your DNA, which is like a giant instruction book for your body.

These instructions help decide things like whether you have curly hair or straight hair, or if you can roll your tongue. It's like having different versions of the same instruction, and each version is called an allele!

A super smart scientist named Gregor Mendel studied pea plants a long, long time ago. He noticed that some pea plants had purple flowers and others had white flowers. He figured out that this difference was because of different alleles for the flower color gene.

It was like the flower color instruction had two different options: one for purple and one for white. This discovery helped us understand how traits are passed down from parents to their children.

Alleles are why you and your friends are all different! Even though you all have genes for things like eye color, the specific alleles you have make your eyes blue, brown, or green. If you and your sibling have the same allele for something, you might look more alike in that way.

If you have different alleles, you might have different traits. It’s these tiny differences that make every person unique and interesting!

Most of the time, you get two copies of each instruction, one from your mom and one from your dad. So, for your eye color, you have two alleles. If both alleles are the same (like two for brown eyes), you are 'homozygous'. If they are different (like one for brown eyes and one for blue eyes), you are 'heterozygous'. This combination of alleles is what makes you, you!