Waited to get my preliminary percentiles before I made this post for the people prepping for the MCAT.

There is a good likelihood you will see something in regards to the topic of genetics. They like to do this trick, often with a discrete question where they switch out the traditional correct answer with a bizarre, but nonetheless true answer.

For example they tell you a mother has some disease and a father is normal (wildtype) and that half their kids have the disease and half are normal. They might make it trickier by telling you the protein product is used for a metobolic pathway in the mitochondria. They'll give you these answer choices:

  1. It is sex-linked recessive
  2. It is autosomal recessive.
  3. It is inherited via mitochondrial DNA (aka maternally)
  4. It exhibits neither sex-linked nor autosomal dominance.

So your logic should go something like, well its not sex-linked because half the kids get it regardless of their sex. You know if it was a mitochondrial gene then all the kids would get it because they all inherit the same mitochondrial DNA from the mom (and none from the dad). But now you might be looking for an answer that tells you something about it being autosomal, but not necessarily dominant or recessive. 2. looks attractive because at least it acknowledge the inheritance is autosomal, but none of the kids would get it if it was in fact recessive (cause the dad's not a carrier) so it can't be 2. So by elimination it has to be 4, even if the phrasing bugs you, you at least know its the only true statement.

If you can do this type of thinking then you'll be fine, but also understand genetics in an experimental setting. Usually an experiment will replace the wildtype copies of a gene with a modified (mutated) copy that has a deletion somewhere. These experiment want to investigate what functionality that stretch of amino acids have. Sometimes they'll delete the DNA coding for amino acids at the N-terminus and it will make the protein have an always active form. If you can deduce from this information that the resulting protein is going to be over activated then you should be fine. Traditionally though, when you're taught about mutations in genetics class it is made to seem that mutations will always render a protein inactive because of something like a premature stop codon or whatever.

/r/Mcat Thread Parent