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General Chit-Chat Forum Discussion about general topics that are really off topic concerning corn snakes, or just about any old chit at all.

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Old 05-22-2007, 11:09 PM   #1
ILOVECORNSNAKES
Question Confused

could someone plz tell me what het means? (ex. anery het lav)
 
Old 05-22-2007, 11:19 PM   #2
DogStar5988
Well genetics isn't really my thing but as I understand it het is having the genes but not showing them. Here is an example, its like people, you can have blue eyes but if your mother, father, or gradparents had brown your children could have brown eyes, thus you could say you are het for brown eyes. So a Classic corn snake het for amel could have amel offspring. Hope that helped


---Kenny
 
Old 05-22-2007, 11:46 PM   #3
Drizzt80
het is short for heterozygous. It means that it has two different alleles for a single trait. With your example of Anery het lav, the snake is homo (homozygous) Anery meaning it's carrying two of the same Anery alleles and therefore expresses the Anery phenotype (black and gray). It is het Lavender meaning it is carrying only one of the Lavender alleles and therefore doesn't express the phenotype (purple/pink/gray).

D80
 
Old 05-23-2007, 12:15 AM   #4
tyflier
Quote:
Originally Posted by DogStar5988
Well genetics isn't really my thing but as I understand it het is having the genes but not showing them. Here is an example, its like people, you can have blue eyes but if your mother, father, or gradparents had brown your children could have brown eyes, thus you could say you are het for brown eyes. So a Classic corn snake het for amel could have amel offspring. Hope that helped


---Kenny
hehehe...Blue eyes are recessive to brown eyes, so you can't be "het." brown eyes...you would HAVE brown eyes. You *could* be het. blue eyes, though...

Like drizzt80 said...

There are basically 2 alleles that make up each gene pair that gives every corn snake their "morph"...normal, anery, amel, hypo, lavander...etc. When one is the "wild type" or normal gene, and one is recessive, your animal is "heterozygous" for the recessive gene. When both alleles are the recessive type, your snake is homozygous, will show that gene...such as an anery or amel. The prefix hetero means "different" while the prefix homo means "the same".

It gets more complicated than that, to be sure. There are semi-dominant and co-dominant genes, and there are multiple recessive traits...but that is the basics.

I would strongly recommend picking up a copy of Kathy Love's book, "Cornsnakes: The Comprehensive Owner's Guide", Don Soderberg's book, "Cornsnakes in Captivity", and Charles Pritzel's book, "The 2007 Cornsnake Morph Guide". These three books combined will provide you with plenty of information to get you started in corn snake genetics. After reading through the three of them, most of the stuff you read about genetics will make ALOT more sense...
 
Old 05-23-2007, 02:17 AM   #5
Jrgh17
And here the bio major steps in:

I'm going to make this a little more simple than it actually is, but basically for each trait you have, there is a different locus. A locus is a location on a chromosome. Each locus consists of two alleles. Let's say we have a snake which has one wildtype allele, and one anery allele. Because wildtype is dominant to anery, the snake would appear to be wildtype (e.g. a normal). However, this snake would be listed as "het anery" because it has 'mismatched' alleles, and one is anery. Now, the pattern genes are located at a different locus. So let's say the same snake has one wildtype pattern allele, and one pattern allele for stripe. The snake would be a normal, het anery, het stripe.

The reason why breeders care about "hets" is what type of offspring can be produced. When an animal mates, it randomly passes on one of the two alleles at each locus. Let's say we mated a normal het anery to another normal het anery. Both snakes have a wildtype allele and an allele for anery. So there's a 50% chance that the parent will contribute a normal allele, and a 50% chance that it will contribute an anery allele. Now, if both parents end up contributing the allele for anery, the snake will be an anery. However, since anery is recessive, if even one of the parents contributes the wildtype allele, that particular offspring will be normal. In this example, 25% of the clutch will be anery, 50% will be normals het anery, and 25% will be normals with no hets. Since the breeder is unable to tell which normals have hets, and which don't, he/she will list the normals in this cluch as normal 66% poss (possible) anery. This means that of all the normals in the clutch, 66% of them are carrying the allele for anery.

Both co-dominance and incomplete dominance are types of partial dominance. Simply stated, co-dominance means that both traits are expressed (Example: Some coat colors in cats consist of multiple colors). Incomplete dominance means that the two alleles will "combine" their effects to show an intermediate trait (Example: A red flower and a white flower produce all pink flowers).

I bet that even that relatively simply version was way more than you wanted to know about genetics.

(End bio major rant)
 
Old 05-23-2007, 02:49 AM   #6
Bwana
Ahhhh, memories of high school fruit flies returning!!

Actually, that was one of my favorite units.
 
Old 05-23-2007, 11:37 PM   #7
ILOVECORNSNAKES
Talking

thanks to all who answered! i still dont understand how it works but now i know what it means when im reading it
 
Old 05-24-2007, 01:56 AM   #8
tyflier
Quote:
Originally Posted by ILOVECORNSNAKES
thanks to all who answered! i still dont understand how it works but now i know what it means when im reading it
This might get confusing, but I will try:

Take, for example, a Motley Snow corn. A snow is a combination of anerythrism(no orange or red pigments) and amelanism(no black pigment), motley is a pattern mutation. There are three genes at work here...amelanism, anerythrism, and motley. Since this snake is visually identifiable as all three recessive traits, it MUST be "homozygous" for all three traits. To give you a visual, writing out the allelic combinations would look like this, using "a" to represent amelanism, "b" to represent anerythrism, and "m" to represent motley:

aabbmm

A snake that is "heterozygous" for snow motley would look like this:

AaBbMm

Notice in the first example, the snow motley, that all the letters are lowercase. This represents a matched pair of recessive genes at each locus(position). This gives you the recessive "phenotype" or look. In the second example, one gene is represented by a capital letter, which is the wild type gene at this locus, and one is lowercase...the recessive. The second snake would not LOOK any different than a normal corn snake, but is still carrying the recessive genes. This is known as "heterozygous".

If I were to breed snake number 1 with snake number 2, it could be represented like this:

aabbmm X AaBbMm

This breeding would produce many different combinations. Using FOIL(first, outer, inner, last) to pair up all possible combinations at each locus, I get these possibilities:

Amel locus:
Aa or aa

Anery locus:
Bb or bb

Motley locus:
Mm or mm

These are the only possible combinations at each locus, however, they can be combined in MANY different ways. This pairing will produce offspring that are:
normal het. amel het. motley het. anery(AaBbMm)
motley het. amel het. anery(AaBbmm)
amel het. motley het. anery(aaBbMm)
anery het. motley het. amel(AabbMm)
amel motley het. anery(aaBbmm)
anery motley het. amel(Aabbmm)
snow het. motley(aabbMm)
motley snow(aabbmm)


Since snake number 1 is "homozygous" and SHOWS all three recessive genes, it MUST possess the recessive gene on BOTH alleles at each locus. This means that snake number 1 can ONLY give the recessive allele to every offspring. Snake number 2 is "heterozygous" at each locus, and therefor can give the wild type OR the recessive allele to every offspring.

I hope that makes some sense to you. If you read the three books I mentioned in my earlier post, you will find yourself "talking shop" about corn snake genetics in no time...
 
Old 05-24-2007, 07:58 PM   #9
ILOVECORNSNAKES
still confusing.but that helped. t.y
 

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