Trying to understand base morphs, help?

[paulh]

My background on this would be with rats, albino and colorpoint. The dominant allele on that locus is "full color", denoted "C". Color point is the "Himalayan gene", denoted "c^h" and albino is "colorless", denoted "c". These alleles are in this order: C>c^h>c, with C being dominant over both c^h and c, and c^h only being dominant over c. Although c^h is considered dominant over c, it is actually incompletely dominant, where an animal that is c^hc^h is called a Siamese (an ideal, show quality animal would have strong points with darker shading over the body, giving more color to the background as well as the points), and an animal that is c^hc is called Himalayan (an ideal, show quality animal would have strong points but no shading, giving a whitish background as well as dark points). cc is of course albino and C- is any full colored animal (black, agouti, blue, etc). There are other genes on that locus, but I am not as familiar with the, nor are they as common as these three, so I have not included them in this description.

If that description made sense, is that how these "complexes" in ball python morphs work too? Orders of course would vary from one complex to another.

In other words, C is the normal (wild type) allele and the other two are recessive mutant alleles. And the c^hc^h allele is incompletely dominant to the c allele. I started mouse genetics. The mouse c locus has similar alleles that have similar dominance relationships.

Herpers have tended to make up words as they go along instead of using established genetics terminology. A complex is a set of alleles. Two mutant genes are compatible if they are alleles.

Don't expect a nice orderly series of dominance relationships like that rat example. Sometimes you get that, sometimes not. For example, both mojave and lesser are codominant to the normal allele, but mojave is recessive to lesser.

By the way, many genetics texts separate mutant genes that are not Mendelian dominants and recessives into subcategories like codominant, incomplete dominant, overdominant, partial dominant, semidominant, etc. For simplicity, we lump them all together under "codominant".