UltraAmel

[Kim_Hansson]

Hi Guys! I know this morph have been discussed quite frequently here but I just have one question. When the Ultra-gene is bred with the Amel-gene, is it co-dominant then?

If I say that the UltraAmel-gene only is co-dominant when bred with amel but not when red with other morphs, am I right then?

Regards//Kim

 

[Serpwidgets]

Hi Guys! I know this morph have been discussed quite frequently here but I just have one question. When the Ultra-gene is bred with the Amel-gene, is it co-dominant then?

If I say that the UltraAmel-gene only is co-dominant when bred with amel but not when red with other morphs, am I right then?

Regards//Kim

The way the question is asked is impossible to answer. Genes do not breed to each other. When snakes breed, each parent snake possesses two copies of a given chromosome, but passes down only one of those to each offspring.

Ultra/Amel is not one gene, it is a pair of genes, one being the ultra gene, the other being the amel gene. So an offspring does not inherit "ultra amel" from one parent, it can inherit one, the other, or neither.

The ultra gene is an allele to amel. It resides at the same place on the chromosome. So, a given chromosome either has the wild-type gene at that location, or the amel mutant, or the ultra mutant. Only one of those three exists on any given chromosome.

Anyway, each snake has a pair of chromosomes: one is inherited from mom, one from dad.

If the snake has inherited an ultra gene from one parent, it needs to inherit the amel gene from the other parent in order to be an ultramel.

 

[JoannaD]

Would Kim be right if she used the word "gene" but meant allele? That's how I read the question!


Jo

 

[Serpwidgets]

The original question doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not trying to insult Kim here, but it would be like if someone asked "is eleventy seven equal to? Or do you have to plus four in order for it to be equal?"

The best interpretation I can come up with is: "ultramel" is a single gene (like salmon) and this single gene is "codominant" (expressed when heterozygous for the mutant and wild-type) but that only happend when the other parent is amelanistic.

This is not at all how it works. I'm not even sure how to try to approach the question because I don't know how much the original poster knows about genetics. The only way the question can be answered is in terms of locus/allele and if those concepts aren't known, there's no way to answer it. :shrugs:

 

[JoannaD]

I may be way over interpreting her post but...what I understood is...

The ultra allele is co-dominant to the amel allele but not to the wild type allele or to any other allele (at any other site/locus?). Am I right?



Like I said I am probably over interpreting her post but I have had a fair amount of experience speaking with non English speakers and that is how I "heard" it!


Jo

 

[Kim_Hansson]

Thanks for the answers! Jo's right, I am a non-english-speaking poster and that's probably why my english can be hard to understand. Sorry for not have righting this in the first post.

"The ultra allele is co-dominant to the amel allele but not to the wild type allele or to any other allele (at any other site/locus?). Am I right?"

Jo got me right, my original question was "Is the Ultra allele co-dominant to amel allele but not to other allele?


Regards/Kim

 

[paulh]

"The ultra allele is co-dominant to the amel allele but not to the wild type allele or to any other allele (at any other site/locus?). Am I right?"

Pretty close. Ultra can be described as codominant to amelanistic, and amelanistic can be described as codominant to ultra. Or you could say that ultra and amel are codominant to each other. Both are recessive to the normal allele, of course.

By the way, dominant, recessive, and codominant only apply to alleles. There are other terms for relations with mutants at other loci (plural of locus).

In mouse genetics, there is a tendency to avoid saying the equivalent of "ulta is codominant to amelanistic". There seems to be a preference toward the equivalent of the following:

Both ultra and amelanistic are recessive mutants because they are recessive to the normal allele. The ultra//amelanistic heterozygous phenotype is more or less intermediate in appearance between the homozygous ultra and homozygous amelanistic phenotypes.

Dispite being wordier, there are some advantages to this sort of language, particularly when there are dozens of alleles.