Quote: "Although the Striped and Motley corns breed true in the sense that they don't produce normally patterned offspring when bred together, they don't always beget babies with as unusual patterns as the parents." It then goes on to explain that when bred to a normal it acts as a recessive but when bred to another Motley or a striped weird things happen, suggesting the two are different versions of the same allele and can act Co-dominant. See why I was a tad confused



Bill Love is good, but none of us is perfect. 8-/



A few years ago a guy showed me some corns that he said were from a mating of a motley to a striped. They looked more or less intermediate between the two parents to me. They certainly were not as different from normal as the striped parent. So Bill might have been clearer, but he was mostly accurate.



If the motley and striped mutants were independent, the babies from a motley x striped mating would look normal. The actual results indicate that the babies have one motley gene paired with one striped gene, making the babies heterozygous motley/striped. And as the babies are more or less intermediate in pattern between the parents, the motley and striped mutants are codominant compared to each other. However, both are still called recessives because both are recessive when compared to the normal version of the gene.



Heterozygous motley/striped x normal should produce

1/2 normal (heterozygous motley)

1/2 normal (heterozygous striped)



Heterozygous motley/striped x motley should produce

1/2 motley

1/2 heterozygous motley/striped



Heterozygous motley/striped x striped should produce

1/2 striped

1/2 heterozygous motley/striped



Heterozygous motley/striped x heterozygous motley/striped should produce

1/4 striped

2/4 heterozygous motley/striped

1/4 motley



IOW, there are three alleles at the motley locus -- the normal (wild type) allele, the motley mutant allele, and the striped mutant allele.



Paul Hollander

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