Interesting Twist on Toffee Project

[Serpent_Nirvana]

Tessada I think the problem that folks are having is that you've listed all of these lovely terms*, but not posited a hypothesis as to how the whole toffee/albino/lavender thing would work, if not that toffee and albino are allelic. (That, and that you present your opinion in a fashion that demeans the opinions of others -- whether that is your intention or not -- which never tends to go over well.)

I can throw out some terms, too, some of which you didn't mention, like post-translational modification, DNA methyllation, DNA imprinting, etc. etc.. And sure, I could make up a hypothesis like "toffee is actually not a loss-of-function mutation of a single pigment-related gene at all, but is an epistatic modifier that will modify the effect of albino OR lavender to cause the toffee phenotype."

Sure, we're all just playing guessing games anyway; without proof, that's all we can do. ... But don't you think it's fun? I think it's great that snake breeders take such a strong interest in genetics. I breed and work with a few other species, and it seems to me that snake people take much more time to think about genetics than many other species' breeders. (Cattle notwithstanding -- but then, their genome is sequenced, and you can buy a cow that's "guaranteed" to be a high producer based on analysis of several different loci -- yes, lowly little loci -- whose alleles have been supposedly shown to be linked to production traits.)

The hypotheses we come up with to explain what we see in the snake world may not always be right, but they work. Our working hypothesis about the "platinum complex" alleles, for example, allows us to predict what we're going to get when breeding animals of this complex with a high degree of accuracy. There's no proof that we're right, and that all of those alleles are on the same locus, but at the moment we also have no reason to doubt. There's an expression in science, "keep it simple ..."

I will say, if our sample size at present is a whopping two whole breedings, I, too, fall into the category of "not yet convinced" that toffee and albino are allelic. (Although, the BLBC thread that I'm skimming now is suggesting otherwise ... YIKES! More scandal!)

I will be thoroughly convinced if albino x toffee produces toffino 100% of the time, and toffino x albino = 50% toffino, 50% albino, etc., etc.. Maybe that makes me a simple-minded fool when it comes to the complexities of genetics, but I prefer hypotheses I can work with to make predictions about outcomes as opposed to conjecture for conjecture's sake. (Not that the conjecture isn't fun as well, but when you're planning breedings it helps to have some sense of an idea and not just say, "Well, we don't really know what we're talking about, so why bother?")

Y'know? Hey aren't those toffees some pretty snakes? I want one. (Even if they are just glorified albinos -- ha!)


* Some of which don't seem to quite fit ... Dilution genes? Eh? Makes me think of the Sesamie Street song, "One of these things is not like the other ..."