Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Is it possible to retrieve blood from a young unsexable gecko and send it to a DNA lab to identify if it's a male or female? How much would this cost and how accurate is this?

Im gonna go with way to expensive. First off, youd need to get blood from an egg, without puncturing the fetus itself or coming out of the other side of the egg. Just not worth it, probably not possible without killing the fetus.
-Richard

Of course you can , and expect to get 100% accuracy. You dont need blood, it can be accomplished with their skin. But blood is preferred. It may even be possible to use some of the reamins of the egg.! How do you think they seem to export so many more knobtail babies from Europe and a substantial amount just happen to end up being males! To take it one step further, I am sure it is also done here in the USA as well. Their is a company in Texas that deals with Reptiles and Amphibians and does DNA testing. I met them while I was in Daytona at the Herp convention, but never pursued it with them. JERRY

Its actually quite easy to do. All you need is a large piece of shed skin. It is recommended that you get a few samples of other individuals of the same species so you could have comparison results (needed in some instances if one does not already have a gender definition in the species). The process is slow though. It would take 2-3 days because of the PCR experiment needed to replicate the dna. You really could get it done nearly anywhere that has an electrophoresys set up. DNA analysis is a junior class college course in almost all cases.

As far as the male knob tails that end up here in the states, that conjecture. I would just attribute it to temperature sexing... Otherwise you're just barking up a few trees and opening up some extra cans of worms.

j.

I'm an evolutionary ecologist who does lots of molecular genetics. We routinely sex birds from blood samples using genetic markers found on the sex chromosomes. To do any genetic sexing some knowledge of a variable region of the sex chromosomes is required and such data is not available for all species. So if there are no suitable primers for the PCR reaction then sexing will not be easy. Also, if the species you are interested in has temperature dependent sex determination then you will not be able to distinguish males and females genetically. However simply getting quality genomic DNA is relatively easy. Like others have said already, shed skins should work fine. We have extracted DNA from a small piece of toe pad from 100 year old bird museum skins.

Incidentally I am interested in doing some molecular genetics work on Rhacodactylus so if any one has any dead hatchlings, tails or shed skins then let me know!

Herm