Toffino genetics question

[PsychD_Student]

So a toffino is the pairing of a toffee and an albino. Breeding single heterozygous animals for toffee and albino, i.e. Tt x Aa, is one way to get toffino offspring. Well, if you breed a normal female to a toffino male, will some of the offspring be toffino? Going by the anticipated punnet square--according to my understanding, one would get 25% toffino (TtAa), 25% normal (ttaa), 25% het toffee (Ttaa) and 25% het albino (ttAa), right?

Or would it not work that way? If they're working on the same allele, maybe it wouldn't work like that? Instead it could be distributing these heterozygous alleles separately, i.e. a single offspring couldn't get both a toffee allele (Tt) and an albino allele (Aa) which would produce a toffino (TtAa)?

Just wondering about that and havn't seen anything posted as of yet. I know that World of Morphs has a toffino x normal breeding as producing all albino and toffee double hets, which doesn't make sense.

I hope my post made sense! Its late, but I'm inquisitive and curious about the possible genetics of this awesome new morph!

[RobNJ]

You wouldn't get any visual toffinos...my understanding, based on the little info that is out there, is that you would get a clutch of all normals that are het for toffee or albino.

[interloc]

Toffino is a recessive trait made up of half toffee gene and half albino. If you bred a Toffino to a normal you would get a whole clutch of normals who were 50%het albino/toffee. It would be impossible to determine which babies were het toffee or het albino, which is why they would have to be sold as 50% hets for both. Hope this helps.


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[don15681]

both the albino and toffee are recessive, so both male and female in the breeding has to have the gene for a visual.

[OhhWatALoser]

it hasnt been proven yet what exactly is going, but more than likely toffee and albino sit on the same locus, meaning toffino x normal = 1/2 het toffee, 1/2 het albino. or more realistically all babies will be het toffee or albino, not both not none. wont be able to tell the difference

[PsychD_Student]

Hmm... considering that they seem to be sitting on the same allele, I had a feeling that they would probably work by producing all normal phenotypes with heterozygous genotypes. I wonder if anyone has bred a toffino to a normal yet to confirm this hypothesis. In BP genetics, we are often completely surprised by new findings!

[dr del]

Hi,

The poss hets might be really hard to sell given the vast difference in price between a het toffee and a het albino.


dr del

[Serpent_Nirvana]

Hmm... considering that they seem to be sitting on the same allele, I had a feeling that they would probably work by producing all normal phenotypes with heterozygous genotypes. I wonder if anyone has bred a toffino to a normal yet to confirm this hypothesis. In BP genetics, we are often completely surprised by new findings!

In theory, yes, since both the Toffee gene and the Albino gene are recessive to the wild-type, and since they appear to be allelic, breeding a Toffino to a normal should produce all normals that are 50% possible het Toffee/50% possible het Albino. Won't know which until you breed them (and, from what I've read, then wait for those babies to shed a few times) ...

When you're making Punnett Squares, it's always a bit easier to think about things if the alleles for the same locus all use the same letter. So for these loci like the Toffee/Albino or the Mojave/Lesser/etc. locus, that means using subscripts for the different alleles.

I would represent them like this:

A = wild-type
a_a = Albino
a_t = Toffee

So then

AA = Normal, not het for anything [on this locus]
Aa_a = Normal, het albino
Aa_t = Normal, het toffee
a_aa_a = Albino
a_ta_t = Toffee
a_aa_t = Toffino

[OhhWatALoser]

I wouldn't call them poss hets. Poss het in the rest of the hobby are used for something that may or may not be a het. With toffino offspring, they ARE hets, just we don't know which gene they got. I would word it as het toffee or albino.

this is of course assuming they sit on the same locus.

[MarkS]

So a toffino is the pairing of a toffee and an albino. Breeding single heterozygous animals for toffee and albino, i.e. Tt x Aa, is one way to get toffino offspring. Well, if you breed a normal female to a toffino male, will some of the offspring be toffino? Going by the anticipated punnet square--according to my understanding, one would get 25% toffino (TtAa), 25% normal (ttaa), 25% het toffee (Ttaa) and 25% het albino (ttAa), right?

Nope, it appears that Albino and Toffee are both mutations of the same gene (alleles). Under most normal circumstances genes are paired so the Toffinos have a copy of the albino mutation and a copy of the toffee mutation at the same locus. When sperm or egg cells are created during meiosis, the genes are split and each sperm or egg will get half of the gene. Since toffinos don't carry a normal copy of that gene, it has to be one of the mutations.

For instance if you have a Toffino male, all of his sperm will either carry the mutation for Albino or the mutation for Toffee but not both and also no copy of 'normal' for that gene, it'll have to be either one or the other. If he were then bred to a normal female with no mutations for that gene, all of the offspring would be normal looking babies that were either het for Albino OR het for Toffee.