Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I know very little about the equipment and methods needed to read DNA but I got the idea that a few years ago the speed was rapidly going up and the cost was rapidly going down. Are we still a few years off from home DNA readers . I realize that the amount of data is huge and even with a computer it would be much much more complicated than when I made a master key for my dorm from taking two locks apart but it seems to me that reading the DNA is an important first step.

Maybe someone can do a survey to ascertain the demand for a ball python paternity test at various price levels. I can’t believe that even internationally the demand for goat, donkey, and tilapia paternity tests is all that high but again maybe they had lots of pre-existing research on those common animals so developing the now available paternity tests wasn’t that hard. Anyone care to estimate how many ball pythons sell for over $1,000 in a year?

Sorry, I meant to post this under the Paternity Test thread but after getting interrupted 3 times my login expired and by then it apparently forgot which thread I was trying to post to.

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Greg Holland
G&M HERPS
www.imageevent.com/gmherps
gmherps@sbcglobal.net

Randy,
First off, the equipment for reading gene sequences is in the $2000 range but you need radioactivity and some nasty chemicals to do it. The DNA sequencing machines that do not use radioactivity and are high throughput sequencers (like they use for genome projects) are $150,000. The cost of running one sequence once everything is set up is only about $10, which is reasonable.
Here's the caveat; you've got to have a sequence to analyze. If you want to know which baby is a het and which isn't, you've got to find the sequence that it is het for, and that could take years of research costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in research time.
If you put two daddies with a mommy and all you want to know is which daddy is the real daddy, that's a much easier problem. Random primer PCR on some blood of both daddies, the mommy and the baby will allow you to set up linkage groups and decide who is the dad. That's how they do it for people. It's even easier with reptiles because they have nucleated red blood cells so only a tiny bit of blood is needed. You could probably even do it with a bit of shed skin which usually contains some DNA from sloughed off epidermis.

Thanks!

Paternity was what I was most interested in (or maternity in the case of security for stolen snakes). Is the same sequencing equipment needed for the Random primer PCR test and how much research would be need to set up such a test specific to ball pythons? I'm figuring if someone bothered to develop a paternity test for salmon it might not be all that hard or expensive.

$150,000.00? Holy Cow. someone would have to sell either 4 or 5 lesser plattys or about 9 or 10 Mojaves for that kind of money.

Mark