Maternal inheritance is a type of uniparental inheritance in which all the progeny of a mating inherit the genotype and phenotype of the female parent. It is an extreme form of non-Mendelian inheritance and is seen as the failure of the progeny to display Mendelian segregation for certain characters. This bias in maternal genotype is established at, or soon after, the production of the zygote following mating, when the female sex cell (or gamete), containing the maternal genetic information in the nucleus, unites with the male gamete, containing information from the male. The nuclei of the male and female gametes fuse and the genetic information from mother and father is mixed. In the vast majority of species, the female gamete is physically larger than the male gamete and provides the cytoplasm for the developing embryo. This cytoplasm also contributes the organelles that are normally located there...