CAUSES OF VARIATION

GENETIC FACTOR
SEXUAL REPRODUCTION MUTATION

INDEPENDENT ASSORTMENT

RANDOM FERTILLISATION

GENE MUTATION

CHROMOSOMAL MUTATION

CROSSING OVER

CROSSING OVER

During meiosis, homologous chromosomes line up together, a process called synapsis. This creates a tetrad of chromatids. Chromatids at this stage often undergo crossing over. Simply stated, the chromatids touch at the chiasmata (points where two chromatids from different chromosomes of the homologous pair touch); both break, and the broken pieces are rejoined to the other chromatid. This allows you to inherit a totally novel chromosome that is made up of the unique blend of chromosome pieces from each of your parents. This is one of the reasons why each of us is unique! Two or three of these cross-overs occur in each chromosome pair. If two gene locations (loci) are on the same chromosome (syntenic) they might not "travel" together after the meiotic division because of the cross-over feature. Recombinant chromosomes indicate how far apart genes are on chromosomes. The fraction of recombination is a measure of distance between two genetic loci; if two genes are located on either ends of a chromosome, they have a greater chance of recombination occuring between them than if they were closer together. In other words, the farther apart genes are on a chromosome, the chance is greater that a cross-over event will occur between the two loci.

INDEPENDENT ASSORTMENT
Independant assortment of chromosomes means that each chromosome of a pair can be individually picked. For example: humans have 23 individual chromosome pairs, which means we have 2 versions of chromosome 1, 2 versions of 2, etc etc. When you make a sperm or an egg, that gamete will have one from each pair. Independant assortment only means that each chromosome is randomly chosen. Whether you have the first or the second chromosome from pair 1 has no effect on which one is chosen from pair 2. This leads to variation because chromosomes that were not previously in the same person can end up that way. In each pair, one of the chromosomes came from your mother, and the other came from your father. Before they had you, these two chromosomes may not have been together before; this creates additional variation. As opposed to asexual reproduction, like in bacteria - when a bacteria reproduces, all its offspring have exactly the same set of chromosomes that the parent did. There is no change in the set of chromosomes that are together; much less variation.

RANDOM FERTILLISATION
Each gamete has a unique set of combination of genes. A male gamete can fertilize any of the female gametes.The fertilization between a male gamete and a female gamete occurs randomly in the Fallopian tube.As a result,each zygote is unique and hence variation occurs due to the different combination of genes from the male and female gamete. The random combination of chromosomes resulting from pairing up 1 of the 8.4 million possible chromosome combinations of a sperm with 1 of the 8.4 million possibly chromosome combinations of the egg (due to independent assortment of chromosomes during Meiosis. This comes out to about 70 trillion combinations, which does not even factor in the crossing over of genetic material during Meiosis.