Crash course on genes, feel free to correct where Im wrong and add to it! E - Extension Start with your base extension. E is for Extension. E is black, e is red. Red is recessive, black is dominant. That means that if a horse has E it will be black, period. Red horses are ee. (Red is Chestnut and/or Sorrel) EE - Black Ee - Black ee - Red A - Agouti Then add that first modifier, agouti! A is for Agouti! Agouti restricts the black on the horse to the points (ears, muzzle, legs, mane and tail). So, if your horse has any black (Ee or EE) and you add A, the black will only show up on those points, the rest of the horse will appear red. Agouti is dominant, so it only takes one copy of it to show. Then you have brown, which is a variant of Agouti. Bay is dominant over Brown EE AA - Bay Ee AA - Bay ee AA - Red EE Aa - Bay Ee Aa - Bay ee Aa - Red EE AtA - Bay Ee AtA - Bay ee AtA - Red EE AtAt - Brown Ee AtAt - Brown ee AtAt - Red EE Ata - Brown Ee Ata - Brown ee - Ata - Red EE aa - Black Ee aa - Black ee aa Red Cr - Cream Next add your cream dilutions. Cream is a partial dominant, which means that one copy changes the color a little, two copies change the color a lot. remember your codes above. Bay + 1 cream = Buckskin Bay + 2 cream = Perlino Brown + 1 cream = Brownskin or Smokey Brown Brown + 2 cream = Perlino, theres currently no term for double cream brown as far as I know Black + 1 cream = Smokey Black (sometimes its hard to see a visual difference between smokey black and black, black likes to hide patterns and dilutions sometimes) Black + 2 cream = Smokey Cream Red + 1 cream = Palomino Red + 2 cream = Cremello D - Dun Another dilution is Dun. This will cause a dark dorsal line, leg barring, shoulder stripe/shadow, dark ear tips, cobwebbing on the face, generally a wild kind of look that shows more camouflage you could see in the wild. Some horses will exhibit this more obviously than others. Dun is dominant, so if a horse carries Dun, you can see it unless theres something else going on that will cover it up. Dun can exist with all the other modifiers. G - Grey Grey is a masking gene, it will eventually cover anything and everything else. If your horse tests Gg or GG, it will turn completely white if it lives long enough (sometimes that can take 30+ years though!). Now, getting to breeding....any time you breed, each horse will throw one gene. Sire will toss in one from each locus, and dam will toss in one from each locus. So, If you breed an EE horse to an ee horse, the EE horse will throw an E, and the ee horse will throw an e and you know that you are guaranteed to get an Ee horse, which will be black but heterozygous (heterozygous means that it only carries one copy of the gene, homozygous means that it carries two copies) So, if you have a horse that is Ee and breed it to a horse that is Ee, each parent could throw either one, so you have a chance of getting EE, Ee or ee. This is where the Punnit square comes in handy, if you know what that is. If not, just google it, its the most handy little tool for learning genetics! Of course there are many other genes out there, like the spotting patterns and other dilutions (champagne, pearl, etc)...but this is a quick starter for beginning to figure out how it all works.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 00:13:57 +0000
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