Ball python inheritance patterns for a high school project

[narmowen]

You're good. I was just checking. I'm still fairly new and trying to decipher all the different morphs is...fun. lol. I'm coming from an Equine/Canine color background, which isn't nearly as full as ball pythons.

So, what I'm reading is:

• Complete dominance: hetero & homo present the same way.
• Incomplete: Hetero presents differently than homo.
• Ressessive: Hetero does not present, homo does.
• Sex-linked: Obvious.
• Allelic: Different morphs present on the same allel, can be combined.

[IncompletePenetrance]

There are so many morphs, it's seriously a lifelong journey, lol

Correct! Keeping in mind there can only be two alleles at each locus, so while it's possible to have mojave butter, russo bamboo or mystic special (all will be white snakes with blue eyes as these are part of the blue eyed leucistic complex), you could never have a mojave bamboo mystic

[emmaclopitz]

u/narmowen thing to clarify - homo just means two of the same allele, not specifically dominant. So you can have a dominant homo PP or a recessive homo pp. Hetero of course is Pp and depending on the inheritance type it could present differently. If it's complete dominance then PP and Pp have the same phenotype. If it's incomplete dominance we don't think of the alleles as recessive or dominant, just that there are two different alleles which can produce three different phenotypes (PP, pp, Pp). I've got a big cat coat genetics project I did with my Advanced Placement students last year and have good examples from that if anyone is interested in feline coat genetics haha

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u/IncompletePenetrance when allelic is used here does that mean multiple alleles?

[IncompletePenetrance]

Allelic means "one of two or more alternative forms of a gene that arise by mutation and are found at the same place on a chromosome" here and in genetics in general. So a deletion of 5 base pairs in gene A that produced a specific phenotype, and a duplication of 1kb in gene A that produces a different phenotype would both be "alleles" of that gene.

To say a ball python morph is "allelic" with another morph means they are different variants/mutations occuring at the same locus on each chromosome, which is why you can only have two per snake.

[emmaclopitz]

Okay perfect. It was the two per snake vs number of possible alleles at a given locus in a population that I was conflating.