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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Guess the Genotype #88

So, I discovered today that a number of e-mails from y lovely readers were somehow lost in my inbox. I'm not sure how, but I swear I had never read some of them before. One of these e-mails is the source of today's Guess the Genotype. Can you guess this puppy's genotype? Its breed?

Image provided to me by Little Walken



This puppy's mother is a mix that is believed to have Australian shepherd, border collie, rough collie, Labrador retriever, and/or golden retriever in her ancestry. The father of the litter is unknown. So, what's this puppy's genotype?

To begin, since there is both red and black in the coat, the dog must be expressing some form of the Agouti locus. In this case, the puppy is sable. It is also quite possible that the pup carries the tan point gene due to one or more of its likely ancestors. Because of this, I am going to guess the pup is Ayat sable carrying tan point.

This puppy also has rather intense red pigment in its coat. Going with the theory that this is controlled by the Chinchilla locus alone, this would make it CC dark red.

This puppy also has a mask. Since momma doesn't have a mask, and a number of puppy's siblings don't have masks, I suspect that this puppy is EmE masked carrying non-masked.

Next, the pup is clearly brindle. Since the mother isn't brindle, and several siblings are not brindle, I suspect the pup is kbrk brindle carrying non-brindle.

This puppy us also merle. The patches are fairly minimal, but the ones on the face make it obvious the gene is in action. Since there aren't any signs of the puppy being double merle, it must be Mm merle.

Lastly, the puppy has white markings. They are a pretty classic example of Irish white, but the genes behind this are in question. The mother has Irish white, and the litter has everything from virtually no white at all to minimal piebald markings. Due to this, I think this puppy is sisp Irish carrying piebald.

So, that's Ayat CC EmE kbrk Mm sisp, or masked brindle merle with white.

3 comments:

  1. Very interesting deduction, and what a beautiful puppy that is!

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  2. That's the first time I have ever seen both merle and brindle expressed on a dog at the same time.
    I know that before merle was banned by the ADBA, there were merle breeders that stated the best way to get a higher percentage of merle puppies was to breed the merles to brindles, but even then, none of the people doing so ever reported both merle and brindle on the same pup.
    All I can say is wow! What a cute little oddity!!

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  3. Hey - noticed you haven't posted in a while. Hope everything is okay and it's just because the non-computer parts of life are so good!

    Also cool post.

    Best,
    Fellow biologist.

    ReplyDelete