Now, here are a few important things to know about genetics in general!

-Genes control the physical attributes of an organism. An example of a gene would be eye color.

-Alleles refer to the different variations of a specific gene. For example, two alleles for human eye color gene would be blue and brown. Some genes have more than two alleles as well, such as the gene for cat fur color!

-For non sex-linked traits, an animal would have two alleles per gene. They receive one allele from each of their parents, and both alleles combined determines the way a certain feature on that animal looks!

-A dominant trait is a trait that "masks" the effects of the other alleles. For example, brown eyes are dominant to blue eyes in humans. Because of this, if a person has one allele for brown eyes and one for blue eyes, then they will be brown eyed, because the brown allele would mask the blue one.

-Recessive traits are traits that only show if there is no dominant trait present. Since blue eyes is a recessive trait, a person could only have blue eyes if they have two alleles for blue eyes. If a person's parents both have blue eyes, their child WILL have blue eyes. Two brown eyed parents could have a blue eyed child, but it's not the other way around.

-A dominant allele is usually represented by a capital letter, which is normally the first letter of the word. For example, if "long legs" was a dominant trait in a species, and "short legs" was the recessive trait, "long legs" would be represented by a capital L. Recessive traits are usually represented by the lowercase version of the dominant allele, so "short legs" would be represented by a lowercase l.

-Sometimes, a single allele is represented by two letters instead of one. If "blue petals" was the dominant trait and "yellow petals" was the recessive trait, the dominant trait might be represented as "Bp" instead of just "B" (ONLY the first letter is capitalized). In this case, the recessive allele would be represented as "bp". So if a flower had one allele for blue petals and one allele for yellow petals, the genotype would be written as Bp/bp.

-Phenotypes are the trait that you actually see. The phenotype for someone with brown eyes REGARDLESS of their genotype would be "brown eyed". It's pretty simple.

Here is an example of a punnett square! Punnett squares are when you cross the genotypes of two parents, and be able to look at the possible genotypes and phenotypes for their offspring. For this one, I decided to use the eye color example. The genotypes for one parent are written at the top, and for the other parent, they are written on the side.

-Homozygous dominant: Having two dominant alleles
-Heterozygous: Having one dominant allele and one recessive
-Homozygous recessive: Having two recessive alleles

-A cat is a carrier for a recessive gene if they are heterozygous. A person with the genotype Bb (for eye color) would be a carrier of the blue eyes allele, because they have brown eyes.

-Codominance is where neither allele is dominant over the other, and both are expressed equally, though in different areas of the animal's body.

-A gene is sex linked when the genes are located in an animal's X chromosomes. A female usually has two X chromosomes, and a male usually has an X chromosome and a Y chromosome (there ARE exceptions!). Because of this, females usually have two sex-linked alleles, while males normally have one. In sex linked traits, a cat's biological sex plays a role in what trait they inherit from their parents.

-Melanin refers to the amount of pigment found in an animal's body. For example, a black furred cat would have much more melanin than a white or ginger furred cat.

Don't worry if this all seems a bit confusing to you, it'll make more sense later on! I will provide more in-depth explanations of many of these terms throughout the book.

NOTE: None of the images that I use belong to me! The majority of them are from this really helpful website called Messybeast. From what I read, these images are free for public use, as long as I don't use them to profit. So please don't come at me for this!