hi this is Dr Ben moral welcome to episode 83 of reptile genetics weekly glad to have you here and excited to be able to talk about VPI a anthc very cool to have a publication that where we be able to talk about some of the specifics the Gene and and you know what what causes it what's happening why why we get a an asianic looking animal so pretty cool when we get things like this it doesn't happen every day so um as for updates for samples uh we have the fast test going out pretty much
every day uh sex determination going out usually twice a week um those are still flowing well and then the panel update I can finally give you specifics um once again as long as the Run goes well the run is actually going right now as we're recording on Monday so U by the time you're watching this Tuesday night I should as long as the Run goes well I should have the results and be analyzing them so I'll be analyzing uh Tuesday and Wednesday and be able to start posting them probably Thursday and Friday and the weekend
hopefully at the latest so so they're all all those panels uh are coming out here pretty quick by the end of the week yeah that's what I have for updates Kayla how are you doing hey Ben I'm doing good um I am well I'm excited to talk about VPI is anic today it's been a while since we've done our monthly is morph Spotlight which is why we call it the monthly is more Spotlight uh but it'll be cool um it's really neat to see like this actual science behind the genetics that we play with as
uh as Keepers um and the art Artistry behind that so really excited about it um but for uh yeah let's do business stuff real quick um if you haven't heard already we are uh making sure trying to make sure everybody knows that there is a 25% discount on all shed tests on morph market for the month of November um so definitely take advantage of that while you can you can buy a whole bunch of shed tests in advance and you can uh use those throughout the year so if you plan on having a bunch of
babies uh this summer you can buy the stuff now get a steep discount um you can even email Sean um renin gmail.com and he will and you know if it's a big enough number of tests that you're planning on we can possibly even give you a steeper discount than that so um shoot an email rare genen in@ gmail.com uh if you plan on doing uh ordering in bulk or if you're just doing a few you can still get a 25% discount this month on morph market so uh don't miss out it's awesome one other thing
I've had a few questions come through um people that want to do a 30 Gene panel they're not sure what they have but they also think like it might be chocolate or it might be fire or something like that so the the newer tests that aren't part of our 30 Gene panel um so you can can do it through clutch or morph Market where you pay for the panel and then if you just want to add one more it's just like a $25 um add-on so so you can do that pretty easily through either one
uh just we haven't really mentioned that in the show but that that is set up so you can do that pretty slick and quick if you want to add one of the newer tests and and at some point in the next few months we'll probably update our panels again and we'll probably do a show about that and kind of talk about what what will be the most helpful for PE for people but but anyway for now you can add one of the new tests each one you add is um like $25 add on top of
the the panel not too bad um for those of you who are looking to do like uh who have been wanting to select morph tests maybe not a full panel but wanting to do like all a cart like you know I want to do this one this one this one and maybe not pay the full price for each one because that does get kind of expensive um you can bundle them uh um they're bundles on clutch and they're called build your own on morph Market depending which depending on which one you prefer to use both
of them are B are our partners um and so if you want to do a two test bundle that is just 75 um and you know four or more for example on clutch it's 110 and then just add $10 each for each additional mutation so it's awesome um definitely recommend it uh it's the same price for both of those uh um both clutch and morph Market um for the alart style uh bundles um bundles build your owns it's it's there's like three different terms they're all the same they're great go check it out um and
then the question might come up for the morph Market 25% off is that you know not count if you're doing the build your own but it does it whatever whatever the discount you would normally get um through morph market for doing a build your own um or like doing a small panel or a large panel or whatever the 25% is an additional discount and it'll automatically get added when you're checking out that's awesome stack them up save some uh and uh we went to a show this weekend and by we I mean Sean uh so
we had the um the St Louis St Louis St Louis however the locals say it uh don't come for me um at the n NBC uh Reptile Show and so that was this past weekend um um we looked super official we had our own table Sean sent me this picture where we had all the banners and we had our uh show exclusive shirts there and lots of stickers so hope you guys um definitely took advantage of that and uh Sean sent pictures of some of the folks he met there um like Yeti morphs and I
just now realize why uh I think this guy goes by Yeti morphs that is a very tall man yeah he is not no have you met him before yes yes I think he's always at the um at the Tinley show but I think I've seen him I've at least seen him at Tinley each time I've gone yeah he's super nice and I believe he's a a Texan also oh okay makes sense um and apparently he's a dog breeder too uh because a couple years ago Shawn got a one of his pups um and I forget
this I forget the breed that he said it was but um this is a young picture of the pup that he got from him uh and she's apparently like like 50 plus pounds now so really cute pup and uh I mean that's that's awesome get your snakes get your get your pretty dogs and that looks like such a good girl so it's awesome um and TNA chameleons was also there uh Sean was talking with them about uh us possibly moving into locality testing which I know is very uh very sought after in the world of
chameleons um we progress on it for Panthers o that's exciting yes Al I love the setups they have there like you can't see a lot of it in the um pictures here but that's honestly a really impressive setup even at a show like that's that looks really cool um I don't know if they had animals in there or if it was just a um here we're showing off the kind of displays that we have for our animals either way looks really nice really professional um and that's awesome that Sean got to meet up with them
so uh recently I he uh I heard from you that you got um a shed from someone who sent in an a shed from an all-white snake um and so you know probably an ivory of some kind but uh there was an interesting situation with it so what's going on there yeah yeah so this is another situation uh first of all it's allwhite snake we had the episode a couple episodes back with Justin Thomas where we found out some cool results the all the mutations his allh snakes were hiding and can use testing to figure
out exactly what's going on in this case it was all-white snake and this one as as an ivory and then this one could either be leopard or super leopard it could be spot nose or Super Spot nose it could be head clown or it could be an actual visual clown and so there's just lots of possibilities um really it's an all white snake so you're not going to see that otherwise so the you know the person purchased it kind of hoping it's just kind of a question mark plus plus like you know you don't know
for sure what you're going to get right this one was purchased far enough back you know we didn't have tests for all of this um but raised that that girl up and and did send a shed in and so it was pretty pretty interesting and also a little concerning what the results came out as so results said that it was a super leopard and it was a super spoos and it was a clown all homozygous yeah and then obviously with the ivory that's homozygous also so the first thing I asked was hey is this a
female she's like yeah it is a female I was like uh this might be parth in of Genesis you have that many things that are homozygous it's a little worrisome so I said you know how is this animal done with feeding and growing and and you know we kind of talked a little bit about the a lot of the time partho animals have are slow to grow and and if they do reach sexual maturity usually they don't reproduce she's like oh well I just got a clutch of eggs from her look at that so yeah
so she's got a super leopard super spottos Ivory clown female that does seem like it wasn't par though it laid eight gr eggs for they all have veins and look good and wow yeah I mean that's about U killing the odds when you purchase something that's possible for all those things and you end up getting H for everything that you could that's awesome good siiz girl too from the looks of it yeah oh that for a first clutch eight big eggs that's that's really good oh that's awesome well very cool um good job hitting the
odds okom balls uh or k um from okemon balls so that's awesome and yeah congrats too cool um so this is actually related to a different story so Ben you couple years ago you s sold a one of your females to Stacy Carter um of Old Devil ball pythons um and uh recently something interesting popped out so what's the story with that yeah so I mean it was probably like three or four years ago um and this girl is all grown up now and she got a clutch for from her and uh she ended up
Stacy bred a an ultral uh male ultral combo male to her H just to make some some hats yeah some ultr Mell hats and so that's pretty cool and and this girl that I produced the the mom to her was an OD eni and that I I hatched out that the mom to this mom so I guess the grandma to this clutch that we're about at I hat her out and I bred that line several times I I know very well what's there and what's not there to to the clutch that this girl came from
was a super OD enie spider possible yellow belly possible heck clown that I got from Bob Bob Vu so Bob's balls yeah and so that he I I hadn't bred very much um and I ended up I can't remember trading or selling but I don't have him anymore right but anyway so one side of the pedigree I know very well the other side I don't know for sure um but you know I just knew what what Bob had told me and then Stacy reached out this last week and and showed me this picture of a
one of the babies that popped out surprise yeah that thing is bright that is a glowing ultral yeah so the female was a super orange dream and apparently she was head for ultramild which I didn't know so that man from from Bob more more than likely I I'll have to ask him when I talk to him again or see him at a show again and see if he uh that male that was poset clown and POS yellow belly I guess was also pet ultramel and and that proved out yeah it proved it proved out but
it's only you know one or two generations down so that's really funny um but hey that's awesome uh good looking looking clutch and you know they just just hit the odds yeah so how cool is that um and congrats Stacy those are good-look babies and I hope everybody uh everybody starts starts feeding easily and without too much too much hassle yes awesome always fun to see animals that I hatched out grow up and have babies of their own and that's I just I love that kind of stuff oh yeah yeah it's super satisfying um I
know when I had my first clutch of rat snakes um Scott Hitchcock who's the um founder of the lightning genan and rat snakes when I had my first lightning babies pop out he messaged me on Facebook and was like okay so are these my great grandkids and I was like yeah pretty much yeah so it really brings you closer to people um in a way that's different from a lot of a lot of other Hobbies so special so let's get into our monthly is Spotlight and this time we're talking about VPI xanthic and the technically
pre-publication paper that just came out about it um with a few uh very familiar names yeah so this is uh from the Canadian group we've talked about many times they're the first ones that uh came out with a ballpython morph genetic um analysis and paper uh so this is Alan Garcia aling and and Dr Heather rafie that we've talked about many times very familiar names yes and in this case um they found out that the VPI aanc is caused by a gene called GTP cyclo cyoh hydras 2 yeah cyr hydras two or say that five
times fast we'll say gch 2 that's a little easier gc2 sounds good yeah awesome it's been long enough since I was in like oam and stuff like that I haven't had to say those those chemical names in a while oh that's fair oh I bet I bet tongue twisters in chemistry class or like organic chemistry classes must be crazy yeah and some very nerdy tattoos oh oh yeah that's that's true yeah um all right so tell us about uh what what that means yeah so it's it's interesting the morphs we've talked to up up to
this point and kind of like in general for for vertebrates when they have color and and pattern differences a lot of the time it has something to do with melanocytes or melanin or you know we talked about like with hypo it the reason why they were a lighter color is because there is a problem with the transportation of the the the melanocytes the melanin was still being made it just wasn't being transported out into the cells that that you see when you're looking at the snake yeah it was a transport problem um in this case
what what they learned was that uh for these aanc animals there is a certain type of uh pigment that uh the production of that pigment was hindered so so once again it's it's different because it's a yellow pigment it's not anything's directly to do with Mel melanin or melanocytes in this case it is a pigment a yellow pigment and so the in the xanthor have these yellow pigments and they can be produced um from Tern um starts with a P so it's kind of a confusing one but it looks like pin yeah like exactly um
so in this case um this uh gc2 when it is um mutated what happened and I think on the next slide we have oh so this is so we've talked about this kind of a slide before but I don't know that we've shown it so this is cool because you can see when we do the sequencing that we do when we're finding a new mutation where we sequence in this case a bunch of individuals that that are VPI aanc animals or a bunch of and then another group where they don't have VPI at all and
then we look for Peaks so if you look across there you can see in that second chromosome you can see as you go along you see kind of you know a little bit of signal and then you see like a column going up and then it has that gch yeah one there and so that column going up that's what we're looking for to tell us okay that's a that's likely the location on the chromosome where the mutation is that we care about and then they went in looked at gch1 and gc2 and found out okay
it's gc2 that that makes the the difference so here what this is showing uh for this uh gc2 the mutation is is just a single muc nucleotide polymorphism or a snip we've talked about before so it's just one base that changes but in this case this specific case where that one base is it actually causes a stop codeon so there's a t C's and G's they're three three in a row those are called codons and they code for different amino acids but there is code that says okay this protein's done stop we're we're done no
more protein and it gets clipped and it becomes a protein well in this case where that one snip is it actually it changes it from coding for an amino acid instead it changes and codes it to be a stop but it's not where it's supposed to stop so inter see on the wild type on the left you have all those those coils going through but the one on the right where you have a VPI aanc what that protein would likely look like and it's just truncated it's it's shorter than huh apparently in the function in
the cell that actually changes it makes it so that those uh those Zano those um pigments can't be made the yellow pigments won't be made and so without the yellow pigment being made obviously can't show up in the skin and and we get an aanc ball python hang on I'm counting something real quick I have to make a really a really silly joke give me a second uh okay we're going to say that's like 30 okay so what you're saying is uh VPI aanc animals are like 30 uh 30 not codons 30 base pairs lighter
than wild types uh in weight because that totally works totally makes sense their their protein would be lighter yes amazing yes I don't think you could weigh that out on a kitchen scale but you know you can dream um but okay cool um that actually is really neat um I okay so I somebody else may ask this too but there's under the wild type there is like right above my head actually there's a little star uh does that mean anything that affects us that's where snip is oh oh okay I was thinking it was a
Little Green Dot yeah I believe that's where the snip is that Green Dot I'm not sure what that is but but the star okay I believe is where it's at so you've got three Loops at the top and then you've got a a break and so that M oh so that's the part that is cut off everything after the little star is the interesting okay yeah it it could be that yeah yeah I'm pretty sure that's what it is yeah okay very neat um so and I guess in the graphic here where it has all
the different colored ball pythons I guess that is those are all the wild type and then the rest are VPI aanc examples yeah and and they kind of talk in the publication about different different um like melanocytes and and xanthophores and M and how things move so like the trist stripe uh example there they're kind of talking about about how how the different types of pigments interact with each other and how they move and then also the super cinamon versus the albino super cinnamon in the bottom um so any of you that want to nerd
out some uh you can just type in that that title that we we gave you for this paper and you can anyone can pull it up you don't have to have like an academic um license the way they publish this it's it's free to the public so yeah and I'll have it linked in the description too so you can check it out yeah so yeah they they do talk about some more uh nerdy detail of of how these different pigments are are made and how they interact and and uh kind of like two of them
are repelled from each other and that is likely what causes the like the trist stripe and that's how they uh feel like they're fairly confident what type of a mutation and Gene is is causing cinnamon and why you end up with uh an albino super cinnamon why it's white and doesn't have any yellow and so it's it's kind of interesting and it's it's as good as we can know with what we have right now um really the the best uh ball python mutation the the best information we have to have confidence that we know it's
the right mutation is pi because they did crisper that in a lizard and and cause that phenotype um so you know this is the best that that that we know right now given the information but it does seem to line up with what we see in other animals for these specific genes and the the pathways where the pigments are being produced and transport all that kind of stuff um these papers that that are coming out with information on ball python morph that's the best that we have right now and seems very feasible because of what
we know like in mice and zebra fish and other things right um and they were talking about in the abstract how basically like a lot of um as far as pigment genetics work um most of the work has been done on melanin and melanin production whereas terns uh that produce this help that produce a lot of the yellow pigmentation have been underst studied more or less so hopefully this paves the way for more studies on that so as far as testing goes um we I mean as we've discussed it is a single snip mutation that
creates the VPI anic um mutation that we see and that we've identified as breeders um and so Ben how are we grading that one yep so this one is an A+ since we do have a publication we've run thousands and other people not only United States but in Canada and and Europe you know this is the same test that we're all using and it's it's a very very good test to seems to line up when we run in panels we'll run lots of samples in panels where people already know that it's either a visual bpis
antic or hat and it's always lined up very very well it's very clean awesome um and of course as we've mentioned before we never we don't we give our tests uh an a if we've run over a thousand known samples um but if it has a produ a uh print publication to back it up or a pre-publication um um then it we give it an A+ so now it's time for our shed donor shout out um and I've got a little bit of a showand tell for this so actually let me bring this down um
and solid serpents is donated sheds to us at gber Fest this past year cing their phone number so we don't dox them but um they I have a whole bunch of shed samples here and I'm pretty sure it's mostly corn snakes that they sent to us but we've got what do we have here um mly Tess oh yeah we got corn snakes like crazy um but I know they have more than that I believe and I love that um some of them have names actually written on them those make me happy when we have shed
samples that have names uh so you know you have the AML het mle but their name is Fluffy I love it awesome thank you so much yeah thank you um and solid serpents does have an Instagram they have I believe a YouTube channel and Facebook account um and they work with more than just corn snakes um they have uh ball pythons you can see a nice clown clutch there very shy babies they've got some Pito fist I see either I think those are gopher snakes and I see candy corn yeah I like the candy corn
a lot that's awesome uh and I think they've I think that's also a Ridley's rat snake down there too so they've got all kinds of cool stuff colubrids ball pythons um African house snakes as well um I know those were in there I didn't get a picture of one but they've got a great selection of animals um good folks it was great meeting them at Club birdfest so uh thanks again we appreciate you guys definitely can't do it without y'all helping us and we we love love seeing the sheds come in definitely all right and
I think that is all we have for today make sure you like subscribe uh give us a comment um it helps us in the algorithm helps bring us to other uh reptile Keepers in the Hobby and other genetics nerds who feel like following along so uh thank you guys and I yeah I guess we'll call it call that a day thanks so much thanks guys outro in three two one [Music]
