heritable
/ˈhɛrɪtəb(ə)l
/adjective
1 Biology (Of a characteristic) transmissible from parent to offspring: intelligence is to some degree heritable...
- The basic idea of natural selection is that a population of organisms can change over the generations if individuals having certain heritable traits leave more offspring than other individuals.
- This is hardly surprising, but it was also found that age at first reproduction is a heritable characteristic.
- In it he predicted that a large molecule carrying a genetic code would explain heritable characteristics.
2 Law (Of property) capable of being inherited by heirs-at-law: heritable property was excluded from the valuation...Compare with movable (sense 2 of the adjective).
- The Church of Scotland Trust is undertaking a review of all heritable property owned or leased on behalf of the Church of Scotland outwith Scotland.
- There is now a balance of fully L200,000 of cash in the hands of the managers, besides the immense stock of materials, and goods, and heritable property, all paid for, and the goods daily going off in great abundance.
- In practice, these estates were only rarely intended to become the heritable property of daughters or female relatives.
Derivatives
heritability
- Population geneticists dismiss such gene frequencies by convention and so count digit number as having no heritability.
- The US researchers are now studying the heritability of these marker genes.
- He mentions a new book on IQ and the heritability of criminal tendencies, among other things.
heritably
- The expression of a serotype is clonally transmitted, which means that once a change in serotype is effected, it is heritably transmitted to progeny and serotypes can reproduce stably for many generations.
- It has been previously reported that the suppression-of-variegation activity of a Y chromosome may be heritably modified in a particular genetic background.
- Epigenetic regulatory mechanisms heritably alter patterns of gene expression without changes in DNA sequence.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French heriter 'inherit', from ecclesiastical Latin hereditare, from Latin heres, hered- 'heir'.