Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was a little surprised today, I was on the NERD's website reading about the Super Pastels. I was always under the impression that Pastel X Pastel = 75% Pastel's with a 25% chance for a Super.

In otherwords I thought Pastel x Pastel at worst would give you 100% Pastels. But now I read that you have a 25% chance for normals.

But does Super Pastel X Normal give you 100% Pastels evertime? Or is there a chance to get a normal baby?

Thanx.

[ 5 days, 14 hours to day 52 of my first clutch ]

PS after much debate I decided that I am going to cut the eggs on day 52.

pastel X pastel gives you 25% normal 50% pastel 25% super
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RicK @ BbI

Ball Boutique,Inc.
The home of the singing snakes!

yes it should give you full pastels from super pastel to normal...i'm sure someone has experienced mabye nature throwing a curve & getting normals..it wouldn't suprise me but I haven't seen anyone post it......think of it this way....."pastel" is the het for "super pastel" so like breeding an albino to normal all children will have the gene for albino...so "super" will give all hets which are the "pastel"....if i screwed something up someone please correct me so i don't fill his head with lies..lol

As far as the word Het is concerend...you do not thank of it that way...it is that way.

A Pastel is a Heterozygous animal.

Heterozygous means to be different...and the 2 alleles involved are different so a pastel is a visual Het.

A normal is Homozygous and the super is Homozygous.

Michael Enriquez

Michael,
So unless I am just not getting it. Your rationalization
that pastels are hets is reaching. You can take a pastel and breed it to a "normal" and in theory get 50% pastels , and the other 50% "normals". So if your theory about pastels being hets holds true all ball pythons would be het for pastels because you are capable of breeding pastels in the first generation. That is just simply not possible.
Mack

NO...re read what I said...heterozygous means 2 different alleles. A pastel is a Heterozygous animal.

Breed a Pastel to a normal and you get 50% pastel (heterozygous) and 50% Normal(Homozygous)

Breed a simple recessive gene (clown,piebald,albino,anery)Heterozygous animal to a normal and you will get 50% Heterozygous and 50% Homozygous normal. This is why they call them 50% hets.

Heterozygous just means there are 2 different alleles...a Pastel is a visual Heterozygous animal.

Michael Enriquez

right. A heterozygous animal has a gene pair containing two different genes. This is the standard genetics definition. These can be either a mutant gene paired with a normal gene or two different mutant genes. IOW, a heterozygous pastel ball python has a pastel gene paired with a normal gene.

The appearance of the heterozygous animal determines whether the mutant gene is considered dominant to the normal gene, recessive to the normal gene, or codominant to the normal gene. An animal that is heterozygous for a recessive mutant gene such as albino looks normal. So pastel is not a recessive mutant gene. As pastel animals with a pastel mutant gene paired with a normal gene can generally be distinguished from pastel animals with two pastel mutant genes (homozygous pastels or super pastels), then pastel is codominant to the normal gene. If a mutant gene is dominant to the normal gene, then the heterozygous form looks like the homozygous mutant form. Striped in the California king snake is one of the very few dominant mutant genes in snakes, and it is not a perfect example.

Paul Hollander

Yes, Super Pastel to normal will yield all pastel hatchlings.
Remember, a pastel is nothing more than a visual het for the "Super Pastel" as it's a co-dominant trait.

Hence, a homozygous to a normal yields 100% heterozygous. A super pastel (homozygous) to a normal will yield 100% hets and since pastels are hets, your clutch will be visable pastels.

Hope this helps ya!

The 'BallHeaded' one

Yup, super pastel to normal will always produce pastels. If you look at a Punit square with PP for the super pastel parent and NN for the normal parent, you'll see that every combination makes a PN which would be a pastel. If you do the same thing for PN and PN (two pastel parents), you'll get 2 PNs, one PP, and one NN which equates to 50% pastels, 25% super pastels, and 25% normals.
Hope this helps,
Jason @ Jason's Jungle

When discussing and using a Punnet square you must...especially when talking about 1 allele use the same letter for a gene ...
the upper case or lower case will differentiate between Hets. and homos.

In other words PN is inappropriate.

PP would be normal
Pp would be pastel
pp would be super pastel

Michael Enriquez

I was wondering what case to use for co-dominant? I guess you could think of pastel as equally as dominant as normal so does normal get the capital letter by default?

What if it turns out that spider is completely dominant. Would spider then get the capital S and normal a little s?

Now Randy you got me on that one.

I would guess with the Pastel you could assign any case you wanted...either cap for the normal or Pastel.

Now with the Spider...since it is dominant. I believe.

There is a simialr case like this in humans...with multiple alleles for 1 trait...Blood. When they talk about blood the use 1 letter and they have a small letter in the upper right hand corner to designate A or B or O. Not a subscript but something else..but anyways thats how the spider should be designated.

Michael Enriquez

PP would be normal
Pp would be pastel
pp would be super pastel

I use:
DD = normal
Dd = pastel
dd = super pastel

I use these letters because Pp look very close where as Dd look different. Upper and lower case lettering.
I think any letters will do as long as you define them.
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RicK @ BbI

Ball Boutique,Inc.
The home of the singing snakes!

I use the symbol guidelines for mice at the Jackson Labs web site. The wild type or normal allele is symbolized by adding a plus sign as a superscript to the symbol given the first discovered mutant gene at that locus. Using the plus sign either alone or with some variation of the base symbol for the wild type allele is common in genetics. As pastel is codominant (AKA partial dominant, incomplete dominant, etc.) to normal, P would be a good symbol for pastel. I don't think that this forum will do superscripts, so the symbol * will be used to set off the superscript from the base symbol. IOW,

P = the pastel mutant gene
P*+ = the normal gene at the pastel locus.

P//P = homozygous pastel (AKA super pastel, opal?)
P//P*+ = heterozygous pastel (AKA pastel)
P*+//P*+ = homozygous normal at the P (for pastel) locus.

Paul Hollander