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pattern inheritance

I know horses often carry more than one pattern but would that be one from each parent or can a horse pass down more than one pattern ?

NZ Appaloosas Fri, 04/03/2009 - 20:24

Are you talking pattern as in tobi, splash, or whatever, or level of expression of pattern? Cuz, if the first, then yes, a horse can pass down a copy of each and every pattern it has, just like it can pass down each and every colour+modifier it has. If you're talking about level of expression, that remains in Fox Mulder's filing cabinet... :HB

Diane

nerd Fri, 04/03/2009 - 21:54

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT X-FILES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(except for the last 3 seasons. Man those sucked. Personally, I believe they're still stuck in the giant mushroom and everything after that has been a shared hallucination)

In response to your question, and continuing the filing cabinet analogy, you can think of each trait as being controlled by a particular folder (gene), and in that particular folder are two copies (alleles) of blueprints/instructions, one from each parent.

For example, whether a horse can produce black pigment or not is controlled by extension, and two* versions of these 'instructions' exist--one that gives correct directions for how to make black pigment (we abbreviate this as 'E'), and one that gives incorrect directions (e). So when we go to make black pigment, we look in this folder for instructions on how to make it and if we have two copies of the sucky copy e (we denote this as genotype 'ee'), we don't know how to make black pigment, so we can only make a red-based horse. Once we get at least one working copy (genotypes Ee or EE), we can start making black pigment and get a black-based horse.

When we sort things out to make a baby, for each folder we take at random one copy from each of the parent's corresponding folders and put them into the kid's.

So each parent passes down one copy of the instructions for any trait, but since there are many traits, and any given pattern can be the result of many traits acting together, things are a little more complicated than "one from each parent or can a horse pass down more than one pattern". Does that make sense?

[size=85]*actually there might be more, but for the sake of simplicity I'm talking about the canonical example[/size]

NZ Appaloosas Fri, 04/03/2009 - 22:03

[quote="accphotography"]Mulder!!!! Man I miss them.[/quote]

One of the dish channels here re-runs X Files weeknights at 10:30. As I had recorded them instead of watching them, when I got up at 7 AM today, I had a mini-marathon catching up on the episodes.

Diane

Sara Fri, 04/03/2009 - 22:36

oh man. I used to actually have my outgoing voice mail message something like "Sorry I missed your call. If I haven't picked up I'm either not home or the x-files is on..."

lipigirl Sat, 04/04/2009 - 03:55

The only thing I know about the Xfiles is that people used to say that I looked like Scully......never knew whether I liked that !! :booty