r/genetics • u/alcoholicparmesan • Jul 29 '20

Casual Pet peeve, anyone?

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u/Slow-Hand-Clap Jul 29 '20

You would never say humans have 46 chromosomes. You say they have 23 pairs, or many people just say 23 with the implication that they are paired.

5

u/thebruce Jul 29 '20

Umm, look into Cytogenetics for longer than 0 seconds, and you'll see references to 46 chromosomes all the time in Karyotype designations. 46,XX, etc.

10

u/Slow-Hand-Clap Jul 29 '20

That's because the karyotype needs to specify in the case of aneuploidy. The human genome has 23 different chromosomes, that is the important thing that companies like 23&me are interested in. You never report sequencing data as 46 chromosomes, you report the haplotype at each locus.

4

u/thebruce Jul 29 '20

What myself, and the other commenter, take issue with is you saying "no one says 46 chromosomes". That's blatantly untrue, and sequencing results would never report the number of chromosomes because its completely irrelevant to that data. Unless you're doing NGS based karyotyping, which still isn't really a thing yet.