FINALLY, a science t-shirt for all you genetics geeks out there!
As you all presumably know already, heterozygotes are diploid eukaryotes that have contrasting alleles at a specific genetic locus.
Let's break that down into layman's terms...
Eukaryotes are one of the three domains of life on Earth, along with bacteria and archaea (a particular domain of single-celled organisms that aren't bacteria).
Humans and all other "animalia" are in the Eukaryotes domain, along with plants, fungi and protists (a particular kingdom of microscopic organisms that aren't bacteria or archaea).
For a eukaryote to be diploid, it must have two copies of each chromosome - one copy from the mother and one from the father.
You may have heard of XX and XY chromosomes... those are the shapes made by the two copies of the sex chromosome joining together - women have two X chromosomes, men have one X and one Y chromosome, but all humans have another 22 chromosomes unrelated to gender, called autosomes.
Autosomes contain all the rest of the hereditary information in the human recipe.
A genetic locus is a specific location on a chromosome.
Alleles are different versions of a DNA sequence for a particular genetic locus, for example, the gene that determines the colour of a person's eyes can be either a green allele, a blue allele, a brown allele etc. (where the colour mentioned is the resultant colour of the person's eyes, not the colour of the allele itself).
"Pure bred" animals such as Siamese cats are homozygotes - this means that due to inbreeding, the versions of the DNA sequence are the same on the parental and maternal halves of each chromosome. In this case the resulting "pedigree" child animal will look almost identical to its parents (not completely identical, due to the small amount of genetic mutation that occurs between parent and child).
Non-purebred diploid animals, plants, fungi and protists are heterozygotes, which means that the chromosomes have multiple alleles.
They are, if you will, allele uneven. ( "a li'l uneven" ...get it?)
Here we see a representation of the famous meme pic of a pair of black and white goats, labelled as heterozyGOATS.
It has been noted on a certain website that although they are undoubtedly heterozygotes at many places on their genomes, they are almost certainly homozygotes at the "colour" locus.
We won't let that spoil our fun though, as we love the base-pair of gene-puns on this science t-shirt.
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