Eye Color Genetics

Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum—Johns Hopkins University Human color vision is impressive. People with normal color vision can tell apart millions of individual hues. Most amazingly, this ability is achieved with fairly simple hardware. Part of the power of human color vision comes from a clever bit of engineering in the human brain. There, color perception relies on what is known as an 'opponent system.' This means that the presence of one kind of stimulus is treated as evidence for...

Mendelian Genetics Evolution is caused by changes in the genetic composition of populations. In the field of population genetics, scientists model this process as changes in the frequency of alleles at individual genetic loci. This simple representation of how evolution occurs dates to Gregor Mendel’s analysis of trait inheritance patterns in pea plants, first presented in 1865. Mendel determined, using rigorous collection of data, that noticeable traits are controlled by two alleles of each...

Color in Coordination Complexes When atoms or molecules absorb light at the proper frequency, their electrons are excited to higher-energy orbitals. For many main group atoms and molecules, the absorbed photons are in the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum, which cannot be detected by the human eye. For coordination compounds, the energy difference between the d orbitals often allows photons in the visible range to be absorbed and emitted, which is seen as colors by the human eye.

Reading in color is a new method for training letter-color associations that are typically found only in grapheme-color synesthetes. It involves an implicit form of training that has potential for long-term associative training methods because the training is a byproduct of reading and any text can be colored.

Color perception begins in the retina, the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye. Two main theories explain how colors are seen: the trichromatic theory and the opponent-process theory. The trichromatic theory, proposed by Thomas Young in 1802 and extended by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1852, suggests that color vision is based on three types of cone receptors in the retina. These cones are sensitive to different but overlapping ranges of wavelengths corresponding to red, blue, and green.