system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How is allele dominant to another at a fundamental, chemical level?

I’m a senior in college graduating with a degree in chemistry and have always been curious about gene expression at a chemical level. Like say height or eye color, what chemical force in DNA/RNA/organelles/whatever is causing a gene to be expressed more than another or make the allele/gene “dominant”?
gpt
really hate the terms "dominant" and "recessive" for causing exactly the confusion you are describing.

In most cases, both alleles get expressed and turned into protein. If you're heterozygous, you'll have two different proteins made, one for each allele. Now, think it terms of what the expressed proteins actually do. If it's an enzyme, one functional copy is usually enough to do the job, so the activity of the functional protein makes up for the bad one and you don't notice anything phenotypical, aka recessive. It's it's a structural protein, the bad protein can interfere by blocking good copies of the protein from adding to the structure, making the bad protein mask the function of the good copy, aka dominant.

Basically, think about what actually happens when two different proteins express. The resulting action determines if it's dominant, recessive, or somewhere in between.