Sondra Dorsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
>Another question for the group...what have been
>people's experience with the terms "undefined" and
>"unknown" color on the Gerbil Gene Predictor and
>Gerbil Gene Calculator? What do those mean exactly?
Put simply, there are not established names for all possible colours.
With the eight known mutations, and the semi-dominance of some of these
mutations, there are well over a thousand possible colours. Of course
over three-quarters of these will look very much like another colour.
Even so, that leaves you with about 200 colours. There are about 50
terms in existence that describe distinct colours.
The other problem is that it is very difficult to systematically breed
every possible combination of genes just to see what it looks like.
There are people who have done this with some of the mutations, but it
takes years to develop pure strains that can be used for these sort of
projects.
>Is there the potential for a totally new color to turn
>up, or does the program just not take into account all
>possible colors?
The latter. Of course there is the possibility of new mutations, and
possibly a new combination that has not been produced before. But most
new combinations will be variants of white, cream or grey.
>We have a pale red fox and a
>dove/sapphire, and assuming they each carry all
>possible recessives (which I know isn't necessarily
>true), we end up with %34 "undefined" color on the
>GGP! Even with them carrying all dominant genes, we
>still end up with at least %9 "undefined" or
>"unknown". I'm intrigued, yet baffled!
Most of those will probably be whites. It is just that there are so many
combinations that produce white animals, and by definition white animals
give you few clues of which colour genes they have.
--
Julian
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
National Gerbil Society
http://www.gerbils.co.uk/
