In most cases the mother already had the mutation. Because she has a pair of each chromosome (46 chromosomes in 23 pairs), one could be ‘faulty’ and the error could be effectively masked by the other ‘correct’ copy. But when they create an egg only one of each pair goes into the egg. So 50% of them carry the faulty copy.
In other cases the error occurs during the process of creating the egg: when the chromosome pairs split up. one of them can sometimes go off with bits of the other pair. So you end up with two faulty eggs – one has too much dna, one has too little.
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