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Duxor's 2016 planned pairings

I couldn't resist checking, and both the opal and the tessera popped as female. I was hoping one would be male to make them an attractive breeding pair (tessera lava opals?), although both will be for sale. The opal just had her first meal, but the tessera refused (but it's only been one day after shedding).

Pinky was delicious!
 
Opal is so pretty!! I always start with boiled now. They stay fresher if you have to leave them overnight, too. And hold up well if you want to tease feed someone.
 
Looks like on first examination I have

4.5 normals het sunkissed lavender motley and ultra OR amel
5.5 lavenders het sunkissed motley het ultra OR amel

Almost conforms perfectly to probabilistic expectation!

Holding back a trio gives me a 7/8 chance that at least one member of the trio is het ultra. But I have grander plans...genetic testing of the offspring! This is now possible because the amel locus has been identified at the sequence level, as well as the mutation that causes amelanism. DNA can be extracted from shed skin, and it only really costs a few bucks to perform the test on a batch of babies. The test detects the presence or absence of the amel allele, in this cross any snake that does not have an amel allele can automatically be assumed to be het ultra. I will be posting about this in another thread once the result has been obtained. Probably in a week or two.
 
Sadly it will probably be a long time, if ever, before other mutations are identified at the DNA level. It takes a lot of time and money. For the amel mutation, they basically sequenced the genome of several het amel and homo amel clutchmates, and compared them to each other to find the sequence that always segregated to the homo amel offspring.

It turned out to be the insertion of a transposon that disrupted the gene at the amel locus. A transposon is basically a piece of DNA that can cut and paste itself throughout the genome, it is like a genomic parasite. They move around infrequently, but when they jump into genes they can disrupt their function, as occurred in this instance.
 
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