Have you bred many of the normal looking offspring of the double het albino patternless geckos and found all or almost all of them to be double hets themselves?



One theory is that the two genes aren't particularly closely linked on the same chromosome (if even on the same chromosome at all) but it's just a fatal combination. With this situation, you would get about the expected 1/4 albino and about the same for patternless but you just wouldn't ever seem to hatch an albino patternless.



You would also find that about 1/3 of the normal looking offspring where not het for patternless and about the same not het for albino as expected. Only about 4/9 of the normal looking babies would be double hets.



The other theory I can come up with is that if the genes are close together on the same chromosome then you might get very few normals that aren't double hets from breeding the double hets. This is because the crossover to create a completely normal copy of the albino/patternless chromosome is just as unlikely as the crossover to create a copy that has both mutations. Without this crossover there are no normal copies in the original double het pair so they can only make albinos, patternless, and double hets.



I think your best bet of figuring out if patternless and albino are a fatal combination or just closely linked will be by breeding the normal offspring of the double hets.

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