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Benefit of Het?

O

ohdigeydoc

New member
I've been reading some books on corn snake breeding, and they talk about corns being "het" for amelanistic. Which means they have the gene for amelanistic, but isn't showing because the dominant gene is over ridding it. Their offspring also have a 50% chance of inheriting their amelanistic gene. So if you have two corns that are het amelanistic, their offspring have a 25% chance of being amelanistic.

My question is though, what is all the fuss about het? Isn't it better to find a corn that is "homo" for amelanistic? Because this means the gene for amelanistic are the same, and have a 100% chance (instead of 50%) of passing it on. Is it cheaper to buy a het amel than a homo amel?

Thanks for your help!
 
I'm not too clued up about genes and breeding and im sure someone else can give a better answer then me, but het means that the gene is just not the dominant gene which is why it doesnt show through but if it is a background gene if you breed it to a snake which is also het amel i think you get 50% amel 50% of the homo type or something like that but het just means if you get two of the same hets it becomes the dominant gene. Hope i helped a bit, sorry if i didnt, only started learning about this about a month ago.

Leedham
 
Sorry Leedham, but you're way off. The original poster did a pretty good job of explaining the "het amel" scenario.

There are a number of reasons why hets are desirable:

1. They are often less expensive than a snake with the expressed homozygous gene. With inexpensive and common genes like amel, it hardly matters. But with a gene like cinder, the difference in cost between a het and homo is hundreds of dollars. So if you buy two hets, you can still produce a few cinders without having spent TOO much money at the outset.

2. Hets can contribute to the variety of your clutches. You can breed an amel het anery to an anery het amel and get amels, anerys, and snows in the same clutch.

3. Some combinations of genes don't even EXIST in homozygous form yet. If you want cinder-bloodreds, you have no choice but to produce them from hets. Cinder-bloodreds don't exist yet.
 
Ok, so it's primarily a case of cost and/or rarity. That's what I gathered. It just didn't make sense not to use a homozygous corn instead.

Makes sense now, thanks guys! :D
 
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