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Genetics question

S

SteveP

New member
Ok so I'm doing my best to understand all this genetic stuff and have been reading a ton on the subject lately (work has me traveling... lots of boring down time). Problem I have is its mostly all written WAAAAAAAAYYYY over my head. Can someone break it down to me in dumb dumb terms please?

Let's take something generally simple like a snow for example. A snow is basically comprised of 2 recessive genes Anery and Amel. What I'm wanting to know is if I take an amel (for simplistics sake let's say there are no hets there) and an anery (also no hets) and breed them. Will I have snows or normals in the F1 generation? If not will I need to breed the the offspring of this pairing to get my snows?

The next question is. If an anery and an amel will not get me there then how would one get to snows in a first generation cross? What hets need to be present with going snow to snow?

Signed,
Confused Steve in West Virginia at the moment.
 
Im pretty new to genetics myself, but I figured I'd try explaining to the best of my knowledge. Stick with the snow morph. You cannot breed an Amel to an anery and produce snows. You would get 100% normals het Amel anery(snow).

If you breed an Amel het anery to an Amel het anery, you would have a 25% chance of getting snows. The rest would be Amels phet anery
Same thing if you did anery het Amel x anery het Amel excepted they'd be mostly Anery het Amel with 25% chance of snows

If you breed normal het Amel anery x normal het Amel anery you'd have an even less chance of producing snows as you'd produce normals, Amels, anerys and possibly snows.

However if you breed a snow x snow you would produce 100% snows

If this isn't the sort of answer you were looking for, I do apologize. If any of it is inaccurate I hope someone will come by to correct me. Genetics are very fascinating, however, also very confusing. Hope this helped some.
 
Yes, we need a very dumbed down version. I've tried corncalc and still can't wrap my head around it.
 
For most morphs, whatever you want to show up in the offspring you will need to have present in some form (visible or het) in BOTH of the parents. So if you want to produce snows, both parents will need amel and anery either as homozygous recessive (i.e. visually expressing it), or as a het. So if you breed an amel with no hets to an anery with no hets, you will get all normals because neither parents share any traits.

A good way to look at it is that each parent carry 2 alleles for each trait. In order for the trait to be expressed, both alleles must be recessive (this is for most, but not all morphs). These are often represented as capital and lowercase letters, where a capital is dominant, and lower is recessive. So AA would be homozygous dominant (normal), Aa would be heterozygous (normal), and aa would be recessive (visually expressing trait).

Each offspring will randomly get ONE of the alleles from each parent for each trait. So for the amel trait, it will inherit one allele from the mother, and one allele from the father. So if one of the parents is not visually expressing that trait, or het for it, then there is no way for the offspring to visually express the trait.

Example: lets say the father is amel (aa), and the mother is not amel and also not het for amel then we can write that as (AA). The only option it has to take from the mother is an A, so it is impossible to generate an (aa) offspring. In this case, you will get 100% heterozygous (Aa) for amel offspring, because no matter what it can only take (a) from the father and (A) from the mother.

You have to look at each trait individually. So if you breed a male amel with no hets, to a female anery with no hets. Lets pretend the letter 'a' represents amel allele, and the letter 'n' represents anery allele. The male amel will be (aa) for amel, but (NN) for anery. The female anery will be (AA) for amel, and (nn) for anery. When you cross these, look at each trait individually. For amel, the offspring can only take (a) from the male, and (A) from the female. So all will be (Aa) heterozygous for amel. No look at the anery. The offspring only have the (N) option from the male, and only have the (n) option from the female. So all offspring will be (Nn) heterozygous for anery. Therefore, all offspring from that pairing will be 100% het for anery and amel.

Now lets throw some het's in the mix!

Lets say you breed a male amel het for anery to a female anery with no hets. Remember, look at each trait individually.
Male = amel (aa), het anery (Nn)
Female = not het amel (AA), anery (nn).
Now mix!
First we see that with amel, the offspring only have the option of (a) from the male, and (A) form the female. Therefore, all offspring = (Aa) het for amel.
But look at the anery. There is only one option from the female, and that is (n). However, from the male there are 2 options that an offspring could receive. Either (N) or (n). Theoretically speaking, there is a 50% chance of either one, so the offspring would get, theoretically, half (N) and half (n). Therefore, 50% of the offspring will be (Nn) het anery, and half of the offspring will be (nn) visually expressing anery.
Put that pairing together, and you get offspring that are, theoretically, 50% anery het amel, and 50% normal het anery amel.

Those are the basics, hopefully explained semi-simply.
 
Thanks so much Heather. This finally makes sense. Jessica, your answer made sense as well and was spot on it appears. Although I had to read Heathers response about 9 times (not enough coffee yet). I did understand it very clearly in the end.

Steve
 
So, because I'm thick, I need some help too. I bred (well, actually left them alone for 5 minutes) my male anery and female amel. We ended up with 14 eggs, which broke down into one anery, two normals and eleven snows. Working backwards, what does that tell me about the parents, and does this contradict Jessica's first answer? Thanks in advance!
 
ruraldean said:
So, because I'm thick, I need some help too. I bred (well, actually left them alone for 5 minutes) my male anery and female amel. We ended up with 14 eggs, which broke down into one anery, two normals and eleven snows. Working backwards, what does that tell me about the parents, and does this contradict Jessica's first answer? Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...
This means that the amel is het anery and the anery is het amel. The snows got both sets of genes from both parents (congrats!) The anery got the recessive anery gene from both parents and is het amel. The normals will be het anery, het amel, having got 1 recessive gene from each parent.
 
See with the wonderful answers that simple folk like me can understand I even had that all figured out before I read the response from Janine. We should have a weekly post for guess the hets..... would give us newbs some experience.
 
I kind of wish there was a sub-board for the actual genetics questions and stuff. I feel stupid asking and I don't want to have 2 or 3 threads a day and spamming the morphs one up with crazy questions. :awcrap:

It sometimes gets to the point of where you understand, but you kind of don't so you try and do it on your own and have even more questions to refine your understanding and sfyhvwer;yfbsd.
 
vovalyosha said:
I kind of wish there was a sub-board for the actual genetics questions and stuff. I feel stupid asking and I don't want to have 2 or 3 threads a day and spamming the morphs one up with crazy questions. :awcrap:

It sometimes gets to the point of where you understand, but you kind of don't so you try and do it on your own and have even more questions to refine your understanding and sfyhvwer;yfbsd.
Click to expand...
This post is actually in the sub-forum for morphs and genetics questions. Don't feel stupid at all, everyone has to start from scratch while they are learning. It's a good idea to search this subforum's old posts to see if your questions are answered already. If not, post a thread and ask away!
 
Totally agree, this thread has come after about 2 months of serious reading, re-reading, and re-reading again. I just still couldn't grasp it fully. I'm one of those hands on learners and since I can't physically touch the genes it becomes a bit moree dificult for me to understand these things. So glad all the folks posting in this thread are good natured and willing to take the time.
 
SteveP said:
Totally agree, this thread has come after about 2 months of serious reading, re-reading, and re-reading again. I just still couldn't grasp it fully. I'm one of those hands on learners and since I can't physically touch the genes it becomes a bit moree dificult for me to understand these things. So glad all the folks posting in this thread are good natured and willing to take the time.
Click to expand...

It sounds as if you simply need to practice doing some Punnett squares! That will give you the "hands on" experience with genetics, IMO!
 
Susan, again I'm a hands on learner. I need someone to sit right next to me and tell me what this that or the other thing means on Punnett Squares. All I see are randomly arainged letters....... totally greek. Anyone on here in the Kansas City MO or KS area caree to smack me with a ruler a few times? (I'm easily distracted.)
 
diamondlil said:
This post is actually in the sub-forum for morphs and genetics questions. Don't feel stupid at all, everyone has to start from scratch while they are learning. It's a good idea to search this subforum's old posts to see if your questions are answered already. If not, post a thread and ask away!
Click to expand...

Well, within this sub, another, bit I've been going back and forth. I will keep searching though. :)
 
SteveP said:
Susan, again I'm a hands on learner. I need someone to sit right next to me and tell me what this that or the other thing means on Punnett Squares. All I see are randomly arainged letters....... totally greek. Anyone on here in the Kansas City MO or KS area caree to smack me with a ruler a few times? (I'm easily distracted.)
Click to expand...

Would some help during chat help? It's almost like being there. We can pick a time, make a private room (if that function is still available, it's been so long for me) and we can start very simple and work our way through it.
 
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