The Chromosomal Theory of Inheritance identified chromosomes as the genetic material responsible for Mendelian inheritance.
Linked genes can become unlinked during recombination; the probability of genes separating depends on their distance from each other.
A karyotype depicts the number, size, and any abnormalities of the chromosomes in an organism.
Aneuploidy, an abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell, is caused by nondisjunction, or the failure of chromosomes to separate at meiosis.
Structural rearrangements of chromosomes include both inversions and translocations, which may have detrimental effects on an organism.
The presence of extra X chromosomes in a cell is compensated for by X-inactivation in which all but one X chromosome are silenced.