Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This is Matt Turners Pied from 01 . I love her white scales and how clean she is.
It is living art.

Image

Is that the one he hatched from a clown line? I'm trying to remember the details, wasn't it something like a male clown het X normal and out popped a pied? Any new information on how that happened? It had me thinking that clown and pied might be alleles for a while but who knows.

Randy what does alleles (sp.?) mean? I've just about got my head round visible morphs and hets (still struggling with doms and co-doms!) so please keep it simple! I'm intrigued tho, I love pieds and wouldn't mind a clown either!

Alleles are two DIFFERENT mutations of the same gene.

In most cases, different mutations such as albino and axanthic are on different genes and even different chromosomes so their inheritance is completely independent of each other. However, it is possible to have two different mutations of the same gene create two different looking morphs. The main way you would discover if this were the case is when someone first breeds the two homozygous animals for the two mutations together. If the two mutations are alleles rather than mutations of different genes then even though the parents don’t look the same neither has a normal copy of that gene so none of their offspring can get a normal copy of that gene. Exactly what the double het offspring of an allele cross will look like is hard to guess ahead of time. Maybe they will look half way between the two mutations or if one allele is dominant over the other then maybe they will look like the dominant morph parent.

It looks like Motley and Striped in corn snakes are alleles with the double het babies looking intermediate to the two pure homozygous phenotypes. However, they have been bred together and refined so much it's now hard to see where one stops and the other starts.

When I first heard of Matt’s pied from a clown het father I wondered if pied and clown might be two different mutations of the same gene - alleles. If this where the case it might turn out that when you produce a double het clown pied it looks pied and Matt's pied looking animal might really be a double het pied clown. Of course it might also be possible his het clown father was also het for a completely separate pied gene due to chance or some crosses VPI was already doing so it's pure speculation that the two mutations might be alleles. I'm just wondering if anyone has crossed pied to clown yet.

I had a similar theory about caramel and albino possibly being alleles and also have not heard back from anyone who has crossed the two morphs to prove or disprove it. Again, just a wild theory that might explain one situation I heard about but it will be nice to eventually hear what happens when someone crosses the two.

I don't expect alleles to be very common but with the number of mutations we are now working with I suppose we might well run into a pair eventually so keep your mind open to the possibility.

Could cinnamon pastel and pastel jungle be alleles? How about platy, phantom, and mojave? Remember, alleles don’t necessarily have to look a lot alike (although with the corn snake example they have some characteristics in common). Alleles are DIFERENT mutations that just happen to be on the same gene.

different forms of the same gene. Every known locus (a location in the genome) has at least two alleles. For example, the ball python albino locus has two alleles -- the normal allele and the albino mutant allele. The ball python pastel locus has two alleles -- the normal allele and the pastel mutant allele.

Multiple alleles occur when the list of possible alleles for a given locus includes the normal allele and two or more mutant alleles. For example, the motley locus in the corn snake has normal, motley, and striped alleles. Loci with multiple alleles are rare in snakes because they've only been captive bred for a relatively small number of generations. OTOH, loci with multiple alleles are common in species that have been studied for hundreds of generations, like mice and fruit flies.

Paul Hollander