GENOTYPE INCOMPATIBILITY AND IT CONSEQUENCES– AN ENEMY OF TRUE LOVE.
Love is a very beautiful thing, it involves lots of sacrifice, care and commitment.
Imagine the feeling you get when you are in love with someone you feel is the right person? Everything seems perfect, the whole world is still for a while, everything seems so good about the both of you and then you are willing to take certain risks just because you feel you can't do without each other.
Love becomes blind, and we ignore things we are supposed to take note of because of how beautiful the love is. We forget the possible consequences of our actions.
Truth is, as beautiful as love is, there are certain things that must not be neglected.
Take for instance the issue of genotype incompatibility; this should not be neglected for the sake of the possible future consequence.
Genotype incompatibility between lovers could lead to giving birth to children with sickle cell disease.
Sickle cell disease is a group of disorder typically inherited from a person's parents. It is found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and some parts of south east Asia. It is an haemoglobinopathy that is, a disease of haemoglobin component of red blood cells.
Haemoglobin is made up of haem and globin, globin is basically chains (alpha and beta) of amino acids sequence. The 6th position of the beta chain of the globin is where the defect lies; there is substitution of glutamate for valine which makes the red blood cells to sickle whenever they undergo oxidative stress (a decrease level of oxygen). There are homozygous and heterozygous sickle cell anemia.
When a patient is homozygous it means the patient is SS (sickle cell disease) while when a patient is heterozygous the patient is AS and he is a carrier (inherited a copy of the sickle haemoglobin), when two carriers get married to each other there are high chances that some of their children will inherit two (2) copies of the sickle haemoglobin; homozygous sickle cell anemia (SS).
Sickle cell patients are however normal human beings, they only manifest the symptoms of illness when they are in crises.
We'll take a look at the symptoms in the next article.
Miracle Oladoyin
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