Quote Originally Posted by Jeff B View Post
All of the albinos to date are simple recessive. The xmas was/is a discriptive term to describe the albino with the oranges that Scott produced a few years back, the way Scott explained to me was that the original xmas albino animal was the result of crossing an Iowa locale to an Illinoise locale albino which proved to be compatible with the Iowa albino, so it was essentially the Iowa albino reccessive gene but it produced a pretty colorfull type Iowa albino (and it was called the xmas albino).
Currently there are only two distinct proven NON-COMPATIBLE albino genes in the plains garter T.radix: 1) Iowa albino 2) Nebraska albino

Now if Don wants to call his Nebraska albino with oranges showing a xmas Nebraska that is fine, xmas is just a descriptive term for a visual color strain albino, not a gene with proven predictable inheritance.

If xmas albino was a distict single gene truely worthy of calling offspring from a xmas albino x normal breeding, then if you bred those offspring to each other you would produce statistically:
25% Xmas albinos (all would be Xmas albino no normal looking albinos)
50% het Xmas albinos (all het for Xmas and would only produce Xmas in next generation.
25% normals.
granted the last two sets would all be normal looking and indesernable so they would be labeled 66% poss hets.
but the above breeding has in fact proven that is does NOT yeild all Xmas albinos.

But let me make it clear that a normal looking animal with genetic background from Iowa albino and Xmas albino background is NOT a double HET, it is only HET for Iowa albino with the background genes (as in polygenic) to possible produce a xmas albino animal which is just a color strain type of that albino, because that color type (Xmas) has not proven to be a single point mutation with predictable inheritance pattern.

Just like it is not correct to say het for snow, that animal is het for albino and het for anerythristic, not het for snow, because snow is not a single gene, but yes if the offspring het two copies of albino and two copies of anerythristic (double homogygous) one copy of both genes from both parents then it will be a snow.

Don saying quad het is technically a misnomer too, and I understand sometimes it's just easier to describe it that way ect. ect. but the animal may be het for Iowa albino, het for Nebraska albino and het for anerythristic, thats 3 genes so that is a triple het, now it very well may have the genes for red color strain too, so it could produce Xmas albinos, and while the two different albino genes and anerythristic togather are capable of producing both Iowa snow and Nebraska snows as well, but those don't qualify and as single loci allele genes that have a single copy of the allele pair to qualify them as heterozygous (het), so you really can't technically correctly say they are het for Nebraska snow, or het for Iowa snow either.

Lets stop using the term het incorrectly and confusing new people. Het which is short for heterozygous, can only be correctly used for a single copy of a pair of alleles on a single loci (from a proven single point mutation)

Now if I'm wrong i'm wrong but so far from the information that I have gathered combined with my own breedings this is how it is, and untill I see better evidence of a predictible inheritance pattern from these red genes I will continue to assume they are polygenic traits, or in simplest terms; color strains.
Very well put.... I bow to the king of genetics!