# Possibly silly question about the "normal royal"



## CBR_Rider (Apr 22, 2011)

Someone in the snake section commented on their "het normal" royal. Possibly a sarcastic comment or just a newbie who is just finding their feet. Anyway I was wondering what type of gene the normal is. Recessive, dominant or Co-Dom. It just occurred to me that maybe a super pastel could just be what a pastel would look like without the normal gene rather than what 2 versions of a pastel gene look like. Hence my thinking that it is a co-dom trait.

I know it's random, but so am I :lol2:.


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## Wolflore (Mar 3, 2010)

I like that question. I think it may have been answered in an old thread I posted about Enchi before I knew what Co Dom was all about. I'll go and find it and see.


Anthony


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## Wolflore (Mar 3, 2010)

Go read this 

http://www.reptileforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=7225489


Anthony


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## Wolflore (Mar 3, 2010)

In essence the Normal is the comparison to which the mutations are compared to. It is neither dom, co dom or recessive. Everything else is either dom, co dom or recessive when compared to it. 


Anthony


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## CBR_Rider (Apr 22, 2011)

Hmmmm an answer of sorts lol. Thanks for taking the time to reply :2thumb:


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## Wolflore (Mar 3, 2010)

I see what you are getting at.

You could say that 'normal' is dominant to 'albino' because albino is recessive. But I don't know enough to explain it or understand it.


Anthony


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## corny girl (Aug 30, 2009)

I would guess that a normal is a Dominant trait, there is no Super form which you only get from Co-Dominant traits :2thumb:.


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## CBR_Rider (Apr 22, 2011)

corny girl said:


> I would guess that a normal is a Dominant trait, there is no Super form which you only get from Co-Dominant traits :2thumb:.


A good point. But could it not also be argued that the normal we all recognise is the super form and, let's say a pastel, is just a 2 gene normal pastel combo?

How do we know the super pastel looks different because of the extra pastel gene and not the lack or the normal gene?


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## corny girl (Aug 30, 2009)

CBR_Rider said:


> A good point. But could it not also be argued that the normal we all recognise is the super form and, let's say a pastel, is just a 2 gene normal pastel combo?
> 
> How do we know the super pastel looks different because of the extra pastel gene and not the lack or the normal gene?



Normal Pastel










Super Pastel











As you can see they are very different :2thumb:. A Super form is because it has 2 of that gene ie Pastel has 2 x Pastel genes & no Normal genes. We know this because when a Super is mated to another it will only produce itself, it cannot produce a Normal because it doesn't have the gene to pass it on.


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## Wolflore (Mar 3, 2010)

Best written out for me...

Normal = NN
Pastel = PN
Super Pastel = PP (the Super form looks visually different from the usual form and so the gene is Co Dom)

Normal = NN
Albino = aa
Het Albino = Na (because Albino is visually recessive)

Someone else will have to do the Dominant one because I'm not up on Royal morphs enough. Suffice to say, the normal gene is the benchmark from where all mutations are measured and so isn't classed as Dominant, Recessive, or CoDominant.


Anthony


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## paulh (Sep 19, 2007)

On a silliness scale of 1-10, with 10 being maximum silliness, I rate the OP's question as a 1.

There is nothing wrong with saying a royal is, for example, spider het normal. It specifies that one gene in a gene pair is a spider gene and the other is the normal gene. But it is easier to say het spider, because the convention is that the unspecified gene is the normal gene.

Traits are what you see (= phenotype). Specifying the identity of the genes in a gene pair is genotype. Phenotype is the product of the genotype but not the same thing as the genotype. Dominant, codominant, and recessive are properties of the genes, therefore of the genotype. In other words, there is no such thing as a dominant, codominant or recessive trait.

When Mendel originally defined dominant and recessive, he did not define any gene as "normal". The first gene was dominant to the second gene, and the second was recessive to the first. When codominance was defined, gene #1 was codominant to gene #2, and gene #2 was codominant to gene #1. 

Using those definitions, the gene that we call the normal gene could be the dominant gene while the mutant gene is the recessive gene. Or the mutant gene could be the dominant gene while the normal gene is the recessive gene. Or the mutant gene and normal gene could be codominant to each other.

Eventually geneticists discovered that the normal phenotype (appearance) was not produced by a single gene. It was produced by a team of genes working together. Each morph is produced by one or more substitute (mutant) genes in the team. For simplicity the normal members of the gene team are ignored.

The pro geneticists could have given the normal gene for each gene pair a unique name. That would have nearly doubled the number of gene names. It was easier to define wild type (= normal) as the most common gene in a given gene pair in the wild population. IMO, it is a lot easier to say "normal genotype" than homozygous not-albino, homozygous not-anerythristic, homozygous not-pinstripe, and so one for another three dozen or so gene pairs.

The normal gene for a given gene pair is the standard of comparison for all other genes that could be in that gene pair. The normal gene is not dominant/codominant/recessive to a mutant gene. The normal gene is the standard and each mutant is dominant/codominant/recessive to the appropriate normal gene. 

In the same way, a meter stick is the metric system standard of length. The length of a piece of wood could be longer than, equal to, or shorter than the meter stick standard.

The pastel gene could be produced by the deletion, addition, or change of one of more base pairs in the normal gene's DNA molecule. Deletion of one or more base pairs could go so far as deletion of the entire gene. The genome would have to be sequenced to tell just how the pastel and normal gene differ.


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## Wolflore (Mar 3, 2010)

Thanks once again Paul. If you'd followed the link above you'd've seen it was to another post by you on my thread about Enchi and Co Dom genes. : victory:


Anthony


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## CBR_Rider (Apr 22, 2011)

paulh said:


> On a silliness scale of 1-10, with 10 being maximum silliness, I rate the OP's question as a 1.


Thanks :blush:

I like your view point on this :2thumb:


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