A Lesson in Basic Genetics

Is normal dominate? or what is it??? how come (not het. for anything recessive) ALL spiders are het. normal, but NO normal can be het. spider?? why does the animal look the mutated gene if it has normal and that mutaint gene in it? it acts recssive when combined with a dominate or co. dom. morph right? but then when mixed with a real recessive morph it acts dominate.

If you don't understand what im saying i'll use an example.. okay so use spider. a spider has 2 genes effecting its skin right: 1 spider gene, 1 normal gene..okay so why does it look spider if normal isnt recessive its supposdly dominate isnt it? (or maybey it isnt, maybey i missed something major??) okay and it wont mix to make a new morph, like combining a pinstripe and a spider will mix to make a spinner. but then when you have lets say a normal het. pied, it has: 1 pied gene, 1 normal gene right? okay so then in this case it acts dom. or co. dom.????!?!??!?!??!?!


maybey im thinking to hard but this has really been buggin me and I need to know and cant find any where that talks about normals here or anywhere!
if someone wants to respond and clear me up it'd make my day thanks!

I'm certainly confused, :P

Don't try and think of normal as dominant or codominant to other morphs.

Think of what the morph gene does in the heterozygous ( only one copy in the animal ) and homozygous ( two copies in the animal ) animals looks.

Spider is a really bad choice for this as nobody has a proven homozygous example so if you don't mind I will use pinstripe - where there is only a rumoured homozygous example. :rofl: :rofl:

Dominant:

One copy of the gene (hetrozygous ) makes a visually distinct animal from the normal wild type. Two copies of the gene ( homozygous ) look the same as the single copy hetrozygous animal. So there is no way to see if a pinstripe is het or homo visually. But you can see it is not a normal in both those forms.

Co-dominant:

This is a tricky one only because ball-python breders are using the wrong term - I think it should really be incomplete dominant if memory serves.

The heterozygous animal is visually different than the wild type but the homozygous animal looks different again.

So a pastel looks different to a normal and a super pastel looks different to both.

Recessive:

A heterozygous animal looks exactly the same as a normal animal that does not have any copies of the gene at all. You cannot look at the animal and be sure it has the gene for this type of morph.

But the homozygous animal looks visually different to a normal wild type.

People are always looking for subtle "markers" that can be used to identify heterozygous animals - but if they ever find a reliable one that morph would no longer be considered recessive at that point but co-dominant instead. :rolleyes:

So a normal and a het pied look the same but the homozygous pied animal would look noticeably different.

You can't really use any of these terms for wild type in any usefull way so it's best not to try.

If that makes sense.


dr del

This is pretty old but I just found it and wanted to say its outstanding.

Is there any source specific to Retics to play around with the percentages of possiblities? I understand completely on single morphs but I have double and triple morphs that I want to hook up and want to see what outcomes may be. Thanks

can someone PLEASE tell me how to get to the classified ads section on this site ? lol IM NEW ! lol thanks so much.

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/forum...tion-or-Wanted


I don't know that I'd call it a "classified section" but it's in the business section on the forum list.

Joe Ellis was teaching me some of this today. Were still working out the Leopard breeding thing. Your layout makes it a lot easyer to understand, going to print and put up in my snake room. If thats ok to do?

This si AMAZING for noobs like myslef. Hahahaha! Thanx a lot:D

Wow, I've been reading through this thread because I want to purchase a pair of pastels in a couple months and eventually breed them. This thread has taught me a lot and I will definitely be doing some more research to fill in some of the blanks! Thank you to all who have contributed.

Does anyone know of an extensive list of which morphs are recessive, etc? I found something basic on NERD's site, but I didn't see a list of dominant or co-dominant morphs. Thanks!