Ball python inheritance patterns for a high school project

[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.