Heh, yah, that's what threw me for a bit...."but, but...you can't get 66% from a cross!"Originally Posted by FireStorm
I take it then pied is a recessive allele? Or do the hets occasionally have some color to them? And just out of curiosity, do you or why do you not keep things as homozygotes? Seems like it'd be an easier way to maintain a particular trait if you have no other way of knowing for certain who's carrying a copy.
It all makes me very curious, I don't know a lot about ball python genetics but I wonder if anyone's tried mapping out any of the different traits....For example, are there some traits that always seem to segregate together? Are color and "scale pattern" separate traits or if you have a pinstripe is it always yellow or one particular color? Has anyone ever run across any defects associated with any of the morphs? In cats and dogs, white colored fur with blue or heterochromatic eyes has an increased tendency for blindness. Things like that. I r curious.
It's a shame no one's gotten around to sequencing the ball python genome, there's a close species but I don't know if it's annotated yet. Genotyping services are getting cheap enough that it would be fairly cost efficient to just send of a chunk of shed (I'd bet a fresh shed you could get a good amount of quality DNA out of) and figure out if your 66% chance of pied is really pied. Problem is it'd require a bit of foot-work from the breeders in order to figure out which alleles are tied to which trait and if they're the same genes or not or different mutations and what/where they were. Sequencing costs are going way way down every year, but you still have to know where it is your looking. Maybe in 5 years. Le sigh.
Reply With Quote