US Trends

where do your genes come from

Your genes come from your biological parents: half your genetic material from your mother’s egg and half from your father’s sperm, which combine at conception to form your unique DNA blueprint.

Quick Scoop: Where your genes come from

Think of your genes as a giant instruction manual written in DNA that tells your body how to grow, look, and function.

  • You have chromosomes , which are long strands of DNA.
  • Humans usually have 46 chromosomes in most cells: 23 pairs.
  • You inherit:
    • 23 chromosomes in the egg from your mother.
    • 23 chromosomes in the sperm from your father.
  • When egg and sperm meet at fertilization, they form a single cell (a fertilized egg) with 46 chromosomes again—this cell divides and becomes you.

So for each gene on those chromosomes, you normally carry two copies (called alleles): one from your mother and one from your father.

Mini breakdown: who gives what?

From both parents (most genes)

  • Most of your traits (like height, eye color, some disease risks) are influenced by versions of genes you inherit from both parents.
  • One copy of each gene sits on the chromosome from your mother, the other on the matching chromosome from your father.

Special case: sex chromosomes

  • Biological females (XX):
    • One X from mother, one X from father.
  • Biological males (XY):
    • X from mother, Y from father.
  • Genes on the X and Y chromosomes have special inheritance patterns (for example, some conditions are much more common in males because they have only one X).

Another special case: mitochondria from mom

Not every bit of your DNA is in the big chromosomes.

  • Mitochondria (the “power stations” of your cells) have their own tiny DNA.
  • You get mitochondrial DNA almost only from your mother , because the egg provides the mitochondria to the embryo.
  • So some rare conditions follow a purely maternal inheritance pattern.

How the mix happens (why you’re not a 50–50 clone)

Before your parents make egg or sperm cells, their chromosomes go through a special process called meiosis:

  • Chromosome pairs line up and swap segments of DNA in a process called recombination.
  • This shuffling creates new combinations of genes in each egg or sperm cell.
  • Each egg or sperm ends up with one chromosome from each pair, but which one (and how it’s mixed) is random.

Result: you get roughly half your DNA from each parent, but the exact combination is unique and not a simple copy of either of them.

Why this matters in real life

Because genes come from your parents in these patterns:

  • Some conditions run strongly in families (for example, certain single-gene diseases) and follow clear inheritance patterns like autosomal dominant or recessive.
  • Other traits and illnesses (like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, many cancers) come from a mix of many genes plus environment and lifestyle, not one single gene.
  • Your environment—diet, stress, toxins, exercise—can affect how genes are switched on or off (epigenetics), adding another layer beyond the raw DNA sequence.

TL;DR: Your genes mainly come half from your mother and half from your father via their egg and sperm chromosomes, with a special extra bit (mitochondrial DNA) coming almost entirely from your mother, and all of it shuffled by recombination so the final you is one-of-a-kind.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.