Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert w/ Ben Morrill .... Genetics are Always simple ... NOT!

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

In this episode we have another epsidoe in the Grilling the Expert Sereies. This time we are joined by Ben Morrill to talk about the latest in reptile genetics.  Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

Hi, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. My name is Justin Julander, if you didn't know. And with me here is Rob Stone. Say hello to the people. Rob. Wave to the people, blow them kisses, indeed, as always. And we're joined by my good friend, well, our good friend, Ben Morrill. How's it going? Good. Very happy to be here. Welcome back. Dr. Ben Morrill.

Yeah. For those that may not know, Ben and I were business partners back in the day. We worked together with Australian Addiction Reptiles and then Ben moved off after he finished his PhD, Utah State, where I also did my PhD work and moved out to Virginia. So he's been out there doing some science and you're working with the Rare Genetics, Inc. That's kind of your baby now, your company, or at least one of your ventures. You've got kind of lots of pots and kind of keeping all the balls in the air or juggling, juggling a lot of things. So I don't know, why don't you tell us about kind of what you're doing these days?

Yeah, so since I moved to Virginia, I did work for a company, a pharmaceutical company, I was doing molecular biology, genetics kind of work, and also some embryo work. I was helping to do somatic cell nuclear transfer, so cloning for some pigs. So we'd do edits, and then we'd clone the pigs, and those pigs then had edits that made their immune system more compatible with the human immune system. And so I did that for, I don't know, 10, 11 years, something like that. And so the last two and a half or so, I quit that job and have just been doing reptile stuff. And the other thing that happened in 2011, the Carpet Python book came out. And Justin and Nick took off to Australia and whoever, you know, who knows where else you're up or somewhere.

So when Tinley came around, I was the only one that was around that was a, you know, a part of that. I wrote one of the chapters in that first one. And so I went to Tinley and sold books and Sean Christian, who was on the Merlea Python's radio or the Merlea Python's radio, the Merlelea Python's Forum forever ago. That's where I started talking with him. And I think that might have been where I first, no, I first started talking to you because I was looking for rodents. That's right. But yeah, with Justin, I met or with Sean, I met him in that forum. So 2011 was the first time I met Sean and he said, hey, you know, I keep birds too.

We can pull a feather and send it in and they can tell us what the sex is. Why can't we do that with reptiles? I was like, oh, because nobody's done the work. He's like, well, why don't we do the work? And so him and I had kicked back and forth things since from 2011 to 2017. I'm just kind of looking what had been getting published and stuff like that. And 2017, we finally had one test available. the boat was a sex determination test for calubrids that worked pretty well across all the

calubrids we've tested except for tricolored hogs and then it kind of seems like house snakes we have some troubles with but most of the other calubrids it seems to work well yeah um and then in 2022 kind of early to mid 2020 um we started playing with morphs and ball pythons there are a couple publications, a group in Canada and a group at Eastern Michigan University, both did some publications. The first one was the Canadian group. They found the piebald mutation for ball pythons. And since then, they also went in with a group from Georgia and did CRISPR edits in a knolls and made piebald annoles. Yeah, pretty cool. That is cool. And they also, someone else with that Georgia group did albino a knoll also.

but yeah so and then the eastern michigan group they had a publication come out pretty early on on albino and toffee slash candy and ultramel and lavender albino they found all of those that kind of went and searched specifically in those albino kinds of genes to to find those and so yeah from then it's been um sequencing costs have come down and access to bioinformatics has has become it's a little easier to get, you know, off the bottom of people's queue that know what they're doing. And I've been learning some of it too. And so that made it. So it was cheap enough and accessible enough where we could start finding some of these things ourselves. So it's what I've been obsessed with for the last two and a half years, almost three years. Nice. How many tests are you up to? I think we're either at 60 or a little over 60 now. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's awesome. Very cool. Is it mostly like Mutation, you know, genes to, and sexing? Yeah, the only thing we've got so far is Calubrid and Ball Python sex determination.

And everything else is all color and pattern mutations and ball pythons. Well, actually, that's a lie. That's a lie. We do have, I think, five Corn Snake Morph tests now. Okay. Cool. Yeah, I was, you kind of were the, my, I guess, teacher. explaining why this stuff is difficult and you know how to um you know all the things that we didn't

really know about uh sex determination and in snakes and how it wasn't you know some some things were wrong in the literature and so that changed there you know just a lot more difficult than i thought it should be you know like you think oh male female that should be an easy thing you know i guess it's kind of easy in humans or you know yeah look for that y chromosome or whatever it's really interesting in snakes that it's so different because in like all of calubrids that those sex chromosomes are fairly well conserved even across you know thousands of different species a couple thousand species or whatever it is and those sex chromosomes first of all they're really different that's zW in colubrid's and the z and the w are much different in size just like human x and y

Right. But in pythons and boas, it's XY, and the X and the Y are very indistinguishable. Even if you do chromosome spreads and staining and all that stuff, you can't tell the two apart. That's crazy. It was very difficult and expensive to get the ball python test. But now that we have that, and we're, I think, finally circling back around to do some more sex determination and morph tests and other species. I hope our next sex determination test development will be faster, but we'll see. Yeah.

And that, I mean, it seems like the obvious one would be green tree pythons. I know you've had that in mind for a while. Oh, yeah. Is it going to be similar to the ball pythons, or are there differences between, you know, different Python taxa? So from what I haven't seen the data myself, but in talking with Dr. Warren Booth, it sounds like, out of all the Python genera, the only one that has weird sex chromosomes, like pythons in general have X, Y, you know, and they're fairly similar. Boas also have X, Y, but it was an independently derived X, Y, so it's actually different. Yeah.

Okay. We kind of lump pythons and Boas together in our heads, but, yeah, especially their sex chromosomes, they're very different. Okay. But yeah, unfortunately, there's one genus in pythons that has whacked out sex chromosomes and it's Moralia. So that's why it's been such a pain in the butt. And it's not just like Warren's worked on it. Other people have worked on it.

And it's, I had tests that would work for, you know, I'd try a dozen and then I'd try 20 or 30 and then I'd try like 50 or 60. And every time the best I could get to is that, you know, 2030, when I get to 50 or 60, it wouldn't it wouldn't work across all of the samples so it just wasn't the right it wasn't a test that worked across all animals and it could be that it's a species or locality thing but it's so hard to know for sure where samples are coming from you know yeah that's interesting because it's it aren't uh ball python's kind of the more basal of the group is that still the thought on on the pythons is that ball python's is that ball python's is that ball pythons are kind of basal and like the aspeditis are the more derived and i believe so yeah that trend through to australia or the more recently derived species but yeah that's interesting you think they'd all kind of keep that you know yeah but yeah well and the fact you can make a carpet python ball python hybrid you can use the woma ball python hybrid yeah you think apparently there's something different enough and uh but yeah we're we're we're we're we're we're we're we're we're

we're definitely working on. And that's the exact test that Sean and I were talking about. Right. Right. Right. People, we wanted to make a green tree python test. So that's by far the number one test we spent the most time and the most money on that we still don't have to this thing. Shoot. Yeah. For a while there, probably for a year or two, I had a test that did work. And this is when I was still working for the pharmaceutical company. And so I could just kind of do it, not really charge for my time, but just kind of charged from materials. Right.

So I did work out where if they sent me the sire, the paternal grand sire, or the male offspring from that sire, and then they sent me all the offspring that were the unknowns, then I could use a marker on the X and Y. I could use a marker, and I could see in a known male offspring or the paternal grand sire what marker was passing to males in that line and then I could tell which of the babies were males from that and then the others would be females but it's like if I now that I'm doing this commercially I definitely can't do it for less than a hundred bucks it might be more like 200 bucks right because of the analysis time and stuff but with the amount that they're selling

captive bread you know green tree pythons for that might be worthwhile to to get those you know get that determined. Not when they get the answer they don't want, Justin. That's true. Yeah, I guess if it's part of your... Yeah, that's true. But I'm hopeful we can figure it out, but we'll see. It's not an easy one, that's for sure.

Right. Oh, well, yeah, good luck. And hopefully you'll have some kind of breakthrough that helps you, you know, make it a easy, simple test. So I'm sure that's the goal. Yeah. Well, now are you, do you have employees? Are you doing pretty much all the sequencing and all that yourself? Or do you have other people working as well?

Yeah. So we've set it up. We have a pretty good size lab in Texas. So I'm pretty much just research and development. Oh, cool. And then Kayla that goes on ours. So we have a weekly YouTube show. Okay.

Yeah. On Tuesday nights. So Kayla's the person that helps me get that recorded, and she knows how to do all that editing and get it all up. But she definitely helps me, like, sorting sheds and, you know, with some of the stuff. But, yeah, if it's getting a new test working, that's me. As soon as it's working, then I send the stuff to Texas. And so if you're ordering paying for a sample to get tested, then you'll send that to Texas. And so, so, yeah, that's the flow for now.

That's cool. And I'm sure you're, you've got plenty of, they're running plenty of tests and doing plenty of samples these days. And yeah, it seems like everybody knows who you are. And yeah, you guys have gotten the word out pretty well. Yeah. So far so good. Yeah. It's a lot different than working for a, had an extremely safe job before working for a pharmaceutical company.

I saw people do really dumb things and not get fired. But, but yeah, I just, I was obsessed with it. I was always thinking about how. I could use the stuff we were doing for reptiles. I didn't want to do it for other stuff. Right. Yeah. That makes it tricky for sure.

Yeah. But yeah, so far, so good. Hopefully it'll stay that way. Yeah. Nice. That's great. Yeah, honestly, so it kind of hit into the conceit of the idea of the show in terms of talking through the sex chromosomes, the difference between Calubrid's, Boyd's, Pythons.

You know, that really hit on it there to me. So the idea is that all of this is much more complicated or it can be much more complicated than we as average hobbyists like to think, right? Or often how we've taken it historically and the fact that, you know, there's sort of an unwillingness to believe that, oh, science changes based on the presentation of new information, right? And, you know, sometimes it's always taken as ill intent. It's never, oh, actually the information changed, these sorts of things. Yeah, pre-2017, we thought all snakes were ZW. Everybody would have told you. And even Dr. Warren Booth, I remember, I was on a, I think it was a chat thing or, you know, a forum or something.

He's like, there's no way pythons are X, Y. But then, like, he was the one on the paper when he said they're X, Y. So it happens. Yeah, exactly right. And that's not, you know, that's not a bad thing. Embracing that, you know, reality is awesome. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, I guess you, how do you know, like, how do you tell between X, Y and ZW? Like, what are the, are there common markers that are, you know, is it the same X, Y that we have kind of idea?

It's kind of funny the way those names came about in genetics. So they wanted to be able to make the chromosome name tell you what the heterosexual. So in humans, our heterogametic sex is the male. We have the X and the Y. And so any animals where the heterogametic sex is a male, they call those X and Y. Okay. And any species, the heterogametic sex is a female, they call them ZW. So there can be some things, like if you look at chicken sex chromosomes versus like a null, you know, there's a lot of homologous sequence that's on the sex chromosomes between those two. But like if you go from like, you know, an null to a human, you know, then there may not be very much. I've never actually looked, but it might not be much similar at all. So just because you call it X and Y doesn't mean the same genes or that. It's just telling you what the

heterokimetic sex is. See, I miss these conversations. I always learn something new from you every time I talk to you. So yeah, it's hard to having you on the other side of the country. But yeah, that's crazy that, yeah, you just think, oh, X, Y, but that makes a lot of sense that it's X, Y, because the male is the heterogeneous sex. That's, yeah, okay, that clarifies it. And I mean, they could have completely different structures, right? Like, the X and Y of a snake versus the X and Y of a human. Obviously, the X and Y of a human is easy to tell apart, whereas the, you know, the python's not so much. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then there's some species that have like three X's and two eyes. There's all kinds of really funky stuff. And then if you look at plants, you have

tetroploids and like even more complicated stuff. So when you're talking about just two sex chromosomes and it's a genetic thing, you know, sex is a genetic trait. Yeah. That's about as simple as it can get. But you get like bearded dragons where if you cook their eggs at a certain temperature, you can actually have sex reversals. So there genetically should be one sex, but you cook them the wrong, you know, I can't remember if it's high or low. I think it's high. Yeah. You cook them at a high temperature. It'll actually change the sex. They'll genetically be one sex, but they'll actually be a different one. So, so yeah, there's lots of weird stuff. Yeah. Yeah, so I want to, I want to put a pin in that one. I have that one much further down the road,

but, and I know we've talked about this going back eight or nine years in terms of, I know that hasn't been seen and snakes, but I have my lived experience suggests that maybe there's something there, and I know we had talked, you know, sent sheds back and forth, and want to talk through what it would look like to try and illustrate if we're seeing sort of a similar thing there. But yeah, I mean, in general, right, all of this fits into the box, the conceit of the show, is just that our human impulse is to simplify and try and understand things in the most simplistic terms. And even when we're faced with sort of almost incomprehensible complexity, levels of completely

complexity, right? Then our answer is, oh, no, someone's, you know, leading us astray or they're just not being, they're being dishonest or whatever it is as opposed to, you know, acknowledging the complexity, awesome complexity of the natural world, right? That's basically the idea. So I have a whole host of specific kind of questions to jump as jumping off points and things, you know, on that. The first one that jumps to mind and really what the prompt for it for me is what's, so what's going on with banana ball pythons? Do you have a test for that? Do you see that? Do you know where it's at, all those things. I guess we'll start there. Yeah, so we do have a very good knowledge of like the general area where it is. Since it's so easy to see, it hasn't been a high priority to develop that test. We still plan to. And the number one question that people have is are coral glow and banana, like genetically identical or are they actually different? And we've been surprised sometimes with phantom and mystic they actually ended up being the same with lesser and bother they ended up being different um so you know it's it's kind of hard to know for sure until we actually sequence and know exactly what's causing the mutation so so yeah with banana the

interesting thing with that is it's a really good example for people that are end of all pythons and know the percentages breeders get. So if you have a male banana that has a male offspring, that's a banana, that banana mutation is on the Y chromosome. And it's close to the sex determining region, but it's not in the same gene. And so crossing over can occur in between there, but it only occurs about 5% of the time. So if you have a male from a male banana, so it's on that Y chromosome, then that, that breeder banana male, any bananas you get, it's a 95% chance they're male. And any non-binanas you get, it's a 95% chance they're female.

But every once in a while, you'll have that crossover event happen, and you'll have what Ball Python breeders call a male-maker male banana produce a female. Now, like, you know, maybe one and every couple clutches. It all started with females, and that, or all these were producing females, which, again, take yourself back, you know, 20, 15 to 20 years in the time machine. Now, Kevin's lying, Brock's lying. They're full of it. You know, this is a big marketing scam. That's the idea. Oh, yeah.

So those original females, right, that was pre the crossover, right? And so they're all producing females. Is that sort of a situation? Yeah, so the same thing. So if you have a male from a female, then that came because the female has two X's. So you know that banana mutation has to be on an X chromosome. Now as a male, when it produces offspring, it's going to only make female bananas unless that crossover event happens because every time it sends the X, it's sending banana. And all of those are going to be daughters. But every once in a while, one out of, you know, 20 or whatever, you'll get that switch. And so you've done the, I guess, the math, the statistics and shown that it's kind of that 5%. There's actually a paper. Someone else did. Chris, I want to say, was it Mallory? Something similar to that. But there was, I think he got data from Kevin at Nerd, if I remember right. But there is a scientific publication. Like if you search for banana ball python and sex linkage. It'll come up and you can read it.

But yeah, they did do. They have some nice figures where they show like, you know, the male and the female and the pairing, which ones the banana, what the offspring were. And they show a few generations and they show like the percentages and all that kind of stuff. And then we did a video recently where we broke down all of the percentages. So like if you breed a banana to a normal, if you breed a super banana to a normal, if you breed a super banana to a normal, breed a banana to a banana if you breed a super banana too but like all the various combinations you could do and then broke down like on the side and there's a publicly clickable link you can go to and you can just see all of the different percentages and okay so oh that's cool so I didn't

I didn't realize there I'm so far behind I didn't realize there was a super banana so yeah if you have a super banana male then are you getting the all bananas offspring and and they're both sexes of banana? Yeah, so if you have a super banana male to a normal, then yeah, they're all going to be bananas. But if you have a super banana and breed it to a banana, then it depends on whether that super banana, let's see, how does it go? We did it in that thing, so I have to remember. But the, yeah, so the super bananas will have different sex ratios depending on where your banana gene is in that female. So I guess in that case, yeah.

So if your super banana is a male and your banana is a female, then your sex ratios are going to be different than if you're super banana is the female and the banana is the male. And then if the banana is the male, it depends on whether that banana mutation is on the X or the Y. That's going to give you different super banana percentage. Wow. Yeah. So it does get a lot. I was surprised. I thought, you know, somebody else laid out, Kenny from Baum City, Ball, Python.

He laid out all the stuff, and I thought, okay, and I'll jump on for a half an hour. It took me like four hours to do all of the different percentages and things. It was a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be. Right. So is there a visual difference between the super and the regular? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they're even lighter and more washed out.

The bananas, to me, are more pretty. There's more color and contrast there. But, yeah, obviously, as a breeder, it's nice to know that every baby's, have banana from it. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's one of the more striking morphs. I actually got one and trade at a show, and she's like a proven female. I'd like to breed her to something down the road, but yeah, just they're really pretty snakes. She's like a banana inchy, something other, you know, like three or four genes in there, something. But yeah. And she's good looking snake. Yeah, yeah. I've always liked the inchie gene, too. So that was kind of, I guess, the motivation for

that. I was like, I'm not doing ball pythons, but I'll trade for a ball python. Yeah. And then that's the other fun part. Like, no matter what you're pairing is, if the, the female is a banana, she's always going to do 50-50 males and females because she has two X's. So those Xs can go to a male or to a female. So yeah, if you don't have any knowledge of linkage and crossing over, it just seems like this really weird mess. Right. Magic and lies. Yeah. no that's fabulous the um well and it's also unusual or pretty atypical to have a not a albino you know type uh phenotype that isn't a simple recessive right so that was the other part that was so

strange about that yeah as it just as a gene and sort of all added to the complexity mystery of the whole thing right yeah there's a an albina a type of albino and ball pythons they call it rainbow and the people that have rainbow are really happy and excited about it but that's that's kind of the joke is you know you're just going the harder way to just make a banana wow that's a recessive yeah yeah that's crazy in the same vein um i know there's been discussion historically around um combinations of ostensibly simple recessive traits that are inherited in a simple recessive manner that are more difficult to make than that average sort of punnet square would suggest, right? So I think it was T-positive albino and ivory

blood pythens making those combinations where in theory, right, and really the ivory, it's a matrix. So there's some, there's a visual presentation on those heterozygous animals and whatever. But just in terms of the odds of getting that double homozygous recessive, that is where you think it could be one in 16 it was taking more like 40 50 60 um in uh leopard geckos there was something i think it was one of the albinos in with a pattern mutation something like that i don't remember the specifics this takes it back i don't know eight or ten years ago and it was on a blog talk hosted show that no longer you can no longer find since blog talk went under but um i think he was talking about it there and where you would anticipate it as a one in 16 and again only two

eggs at the time or whatever but he had lots of animals it i think he said it It took him like one, and it took 130 to get what should be a one in 16. And the thought process is right there that those are probably two genes that are very close together. And so it requires a crossover event to split them up to actually have them be inherited independently, right? Yeah, exactly. Yep. That's why I love that banana thing because at least some people have some familiarity with that. But yeah, we definitely see that with some other mutations.

We recently did a video about, I think it was monsoon and sunset in ball pythons. And from the sequencing, we can see they're on the same chromosome and they're relatively close. And there's only a few breedings. They're both kind of higher dollar animals. And so there's not a lot of breeding trying to make monsoon sunsets. But the three clutches that were there showed that there's only, I think it was out of like 20, six egg 26 offspring there's only two that had crossover events out of those 26 so it seems like that's what's going on there and in that case we we know why because we know that those are

on the same chromosome and relatively close but yeah what you're describing rob is perfect like i was on a show last week with hog noses and a guy was talking about i think it was lavender and i can't remember what the other may it might have been lavender and hypo but it anyway, yeah, it was the same. He's like, yeah, you know, if I, if I breed head to head, I like, never get it. But if I do finally get like homozygous and its head, then all a sudden I can make them. I was like, yeah, that's, that's linkage. Yep. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, saying it right in the sense of, oh, this is relative, to some extent it's known now within the community, but 10 years ago, it was like witchcraft. Again, in the same vein of

like, no, this, you know, this isn't a real thing. They're misleading, you know, oh, you know, misrepresenting what's happening. And it's just kind of, yeah, that's what makes it so fabulous to me, you know, the work you're doing and just sort of promoting, hey, there's reasons behind this stuff, you know. Have you found the hidden gene? I do have a hidden gene woman test. Yeah, I always thought that was an interesting name. Yeah.

What did it turn out to be? Is it just another mutation? So that complex that spider and spot nose and WOMA and HOMA and Hidden Gene WOMA are two different mutations. But there's at least 11, maybe 12 mutations all in that same. They're all close enough to each other, pretty much all in just one gene, but they're all close enough to each other that they all, you know, pass just like their, you know, like Ball Python breeders say acts like a super or whatever. So, yeah, the hidden gene WOMA and WOMA are in that same complex with spider and spot nose. And some of the others that are interesting is Wookie, chocolate, bongo, champagne, you know, there's, like I said, there's about a dozen of them. So it's pretty cool.

We found them all right there close to each other. The group up in Canada worked on that too and found them. Yeah, it's a really interesting gene that has so many different. And like some of the supers are lethal homozygous. some of them aren't and some of them you get some neurological problems with the heterozygous individuals some you'll only get in the homozygous individuals and then others you can get the homozygous ones and they're fine and then if you breed a blackhead to a spider which are both in that same complex you get a very normal looking animal that has no neuro problems at all

it is a spider but it's also a blackhead and somehow I don't know it would be really cool to figure that out because both phenotypically and neurologically it takes it fixes the problem so huh that's interesting ah they're just and there's just kind of no end to all the different morphs and like i'm i'm on a world of ball pythons right now just like i've never heard of half of these things you know or even close to that i mean must just a never-ending supply of fun things to look at oh yeah yeah that's cool sort of in that same vein Are, is it correct that there are multiple alleles that present the expression of the, you know, T-negative albino? In ball pythons or?

Yeah. Yeah. Because in mice, they're definitely are, right, you know, at mice and, yeah. Yeah. So in ball pythons, when we run an albino test, we have to run two different tests. One is a pretty simple, you know, single-base pair change. The other one's more complicated. It's the same thing with all.

Ultramel. There's one change that's just a base change. There's another change that's like an insertion or a deletion. I think that one's a deletion and then Lavender Albino is an insertion. But yeah, we've found many now that we have to run multiple tests. Yellowbelly, there's a minus one yellow belly and a minus 17 yellow belly and they look the same and combos and the Ivories look the same. But I think I still have not ever gotten. a homozygous minus 17. Minus 17 is a lot more rare than the minus one. Most people, their yellow bellies are minus one yellow bellies.

But, yeah, so there's definitely a lot more complication there. And several of the tests that we do, we actually have to run two tests to give you your one answer. Wow. This is great. Can you talk about allelic traits? I know we've been hitting into that, but can you talk about that a little bit, just in general? Yeah. Yeah. So when we're talking about allelic traits, we're talking about, so I guess kind of like a standard definition of what an allel or what two different alleles are, if you're looking at a specific spot, a lot of the time you're talking about at least a part of it, most of the time you're talking about just a small part of a gene, a few base pairs that you're focused on. But like if you talk about like Braca 1, Bracka 2 with breast cancer, they'll talk about different alleles and their propensity to cause.

breast cancer, stuff like that. So there can be, and even multiple genes that are close by, it can be a lot more complicated, but the kind of way to think about an allel is just, if there's two different alleles in one spot, it just means there's some base change or some kind of sequence change that makes those two sequences different. And so it's the same location, the same chromosome, same location, but the sequence is a little different. And so, like in ball pythons, if you're thinking about Mojave, lesser, butter, Russo, like all of those, those mutations are all in the same gene.

So you have mostly all the same sequence, but in a lesser, one of those base pairs will be changed. And in a butter, it'll be a different one that's changed. And a Russo, it'll be a different one that's changed. And so you have these different alleles that all have just like single bases that are different from the others. And all the others, you know, it's normal for everything except for where that one base changes or this little deletion or like I said with lavender albino where there's, you know, an insertion of a different chunk of sequence, but then that interrupts that gene so it can't work properly. So that's really what you're talking about with alleles is it's different, different copies of that same area, whether it's a small part of the gene or the whole gene, whatever you're comparing. and it's just there's some sequence difference between the different alleles. That's great.

And this is before we add in the complexities of sort of there are other genes that present different traits in terms of an animal's phenotype, right? So like just in terms of variance and things, because that was a big part of the discussion was, or are they actually different, or is it other traits within the animal that are causing it to display slightly differently? is it just, you know, the sort of the founder, you know, the average phenotype of the founder's stock or whatever with the same mutation causing this different presentation. So it's great that you have actual, you know, you have the answer now. Again, if only we had this 18 to 20 years ago. You're right, you're wrong. Yeah. It would change a lot of, a lot of breeding plans, especially with the banana stuff. Sounds like you were there for some of that early drama. And yeah, that was, I mean, that was like, you know, $50,000 people were spending. they're not letting people know all they can make are females that's why they're selling females because they can't make a male and then all of a sudden somebody does make a male and then they can only make males from now and like what and then they're trying to decide whether they're going to tell everyone else because now they're still like 20 or 25,000 apiece and I mean those ethical dilemmas that went with that I mean that had to have been such a wild ride yeah well and not knowing I mean you can't fault them because they didn't know like you know you know you know you yeah, you can say, well, most of the ones I'm producing, but you can't say conclusively, like, oh, they're just making female bananas. Is that what you would assume?

Because, you know, if you've only produced eight, you know, yeah, exactly. And then it's sort of a sample size question. And I do think, I guess this is an open-ended question. I don't know of a different example. Do you know of a different heritable trait in snakes that operates in the same way as the banana? Because at that time, right, this would be kind of the first instance we're seeing something like that. I guess there was a suggestion, right, that maybe. be these big calico, you know, antigenic appearance calico reticulated pythons were invariably big

females. So that was kind of a floating around idea. Yeah. Okay, is this something? But seemingly, they were never really certainly not consistently reproduced. It was these big, wild caught animals, but they were invariably these large females. And it was like, oh, maybe there's something to this. But, yeah, are you aware of any other traits that operate in the same way?

I'm not. And the other fun part to that is, like, in humans, our X and Y, like, if you have a sex-link trait in humans, you know, we'll talk about, you know, like color blindness or something like that, there's not really any crossing over happening. Like, that's always going to stay on the X chromosome. And so that was part of what was so difficult to figure out with banana and the ball pythons is because they're still crossing. over going on. And so that recombination is what makes it so you can get, you know, that 5% different than, you know, that like in humans, I don't know. I have never read anything where that, that colorblindness thing had, you know, spread over to the while. There's probably not even homologous sequence there to switch with. But yeah, that's the other crazy thing is like as any genetics you go into, you think about sex chromosomes not crossing over at all because they're, different because most of the, you know, species that we're doing experiments on and stuff

have different sex chromosomes. And so that took a lot for my brain to figure out. Because I was thinking of it as a sex-link trait, you know, with very different sex chromosomes. And what was going on just didn't make sense because you can have a trait on one of the X's and then not see it. And that's why there's not very many women that have colorblindness because they have another X there. And so they're completely normal. So I thought for a little while with banana, maybe some of those females are actually bananas. You could breed them and make bananas from them, but you just can't see it. But what I didn't know then was they're still crossing over going on.

And that's what made it. That's such a weird thing that's so different from normal mammalian genetics. yeah do you have an approximation of like the homology between the x and y in a in a python versus like x and y in a human because obviously yeah the humans are very different and you know so this idea of crossing and maybe explain kind of the basics of crossover just for our listeners that may not know what crossover is yeah so that crossing over happens if there's and i'm talking with my hands but this is going to be audio yeah so yeah the the crossing over you have a chunk of of DNA on two different chromosomes. So it can be chromosome one or chromosome seven or whatever,

but the majority of the sequence in those two chromosomes is similar, but one you got from your mom, one you got from your dad. There's going to be some slight differences. And some of them will matter. They'll make a difference in a phenotype, but most of them aren't going to. And that's homology, right? The similarity between. Yeah. Yeah, the vast majority. majority of the sequence is going to be the same. Like, if you compare us to a chimpanzee, a lot of the genes are going to be like 97% identical. Just those few changes. And then in some of the other sequence where it affects gene expression, there's some differences. But yeah, so chunks of DNA that if there's two different chromosomes and they have a bunch of DNA that's almost identical,

there may be a few changes. When those two pieces of DNA touch, like, you know, come into contact with each other, which they're floating around in that cell. They can easily come into contact. And what can happen is those two pieces can actually cross, like literally kind of cross and actually switch. There'll be a double-strand break on each. They'll switch. And so that helps to increase genetic variation.

So if there was no crossing over, then whatever was linked, like with banana ball pythons, we would never have that 5% that change because there would never be a cross. event. And so that's part of when you're talking about evolution, one of the strategies with sexual reproduction, the reason why you do that is to be able to adapt to a changing environment. And every method that comes up evolutionarily that provides more genetic variation, that provides more safety for that species to be able to adapt to a changing environment. And so if you go from, you know, asexual reproduction where everything's a clump, to sexual reproduction, then right off the bat, you already have two different sources of genetic

information coming together. And then some of the offspring get, you know, one, one chromosome for mom and dad. They might get, you know, this one for mom, that one from dad, you know, it's of a 23 or whatever. Every one, it's a 50-50 chance that you get that information. But then if they also have the chance to cross over, then that's another layer of safety. and ability to adapt because you can also have different combinations of traits and things like that because you can have those crossover events. Right. Okay.

Yeah, I'm used to thinking in viral terms because, you know, there's like RNA viruses mutate rapidly. And so that introduces that change, whereas in us, we have repair mechanisms. So if we're mutate a section of DNA, assuming it's, you know, not in a critical area, we can correct that and bring it back to a. it should be. And so, you know, the variation that may be introduced is, you know, through crossover or through sexual reproduction of combining the mom's genes with the dad's genes, that kind of thing. And, and those lining up, you know, random. So, you know, siblings aren't identical. They're, they can get one copy from the dad, one copy from the mom. So that lines up all different. Yeah.

That's, yeah, it's really a fascinating thing to think about. And then to have like the sex chromosomes, of pythons be so similar that they can cross over and exchange that genetic or the mutation that, I mean, we probably, and I think that's one of the coolest things about morph, the morph thing is that you wouldn't be able to see that happen if you didn't have morphs. You know, if we didn't have the banana. Same with parthenogenesis and android. Yeah. So we can see kind of a visual outcome that is not expected or not anticipated, you know,

that kind of helps us change our paradigm of what's going on in the genetics of pythons. Very cool, very cool. And what was the second term you said there after parthenogenesis? Androgenesis. Yeah, so there's two different modes where an offspring can contain only genetic information from the sire. So even though you know this female laid this egg, this baby comes out, we had one this year. that we did the genetic testing on. And then that individual actually went to Dr. Warren Booth.

He's going to raise it up and see if he can get it to breed. But, yeah, it got all genetic information from the sire. So even though you saw that female lay that egg and it came out of that egg, you know it came from that female. It got zero of the genetics from that female. That's insane. So it doesn't happen very often. And the really cool thing in pythons and boas,

what happens with with parthenogenesis. So that's the female side where everything, all the genetic information is coming from the female. The only thing we've seen so far is an egg that only has one set of all of the chromosomes gets doubled. So if you had a het clown female that did parthenogenesis, then half the babies will be normals and half of them will be clowns. You won't get any hence you're just getting it doubling yeah but with androgenesis there's two different ways it can happen both of them require the egg to be nucleated which would be very weird but it does happen it could you know expel both the polar bodies or however you end up with an egg that has no nuclear DNA in that a sperm comes and then doubles then that's just like parthenogenesis and you'd

get a it's we'd call them like a half clone or it's a doubling you're not going to get het for anything. And that's why a lot of partho clutches in Andro Andro's so rare, I would imagine it would be the same if we saw more of them, but lots of partho clutches, they're all going to be female if we're talking about pythons and boas.

If we're talking about clubridds and venomous, they're all going to be male because of the Z, you know, Z, W, X, Y difference. Sure. But so in all pythons, we'll get all females and boas as well that a lot of the time have

health problems, and that's because they're homozygous for pretty much everything. So if there's anything bad there, it's going to be homeless genes. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. That makes perfect sense. So the cool thing with androgenesis, the other thing that can happen, I don't know if this has been shown specifically in snakes yet. I would have to ask Dr. Warren Booth. He's had multiple publications on this. But the other thing that can happen is two sperm can go in and fertilize that egg and then you could end up getting that that that way you could make either males or females from androgenesis whereas parthenogenesis you should always get females so that's pretty interesting and you could you could get animals if you if the female was a normal or you know

something that you know could not show up in the offspring at all you could breed that male and end up getting offspring that you know you don't even know that they're andro because as far as Partho goes, you would expect it to either be homozygous for it or completely negative. But with Andrew, you could get two different copies. And so it can be much more complicated. But it doesn't happen very often. Right. But again, morphs kind of have lit the way for us to identify these things happen at all.

That's incredible. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's obvious to, you know, if you have a few. female that lays an egg and it hatches and she was never with a male, then, you know, parthenogenesis is occurring. But, you know, androgenesis, that would be, you know, is it known in anything else? Or it? I honestly don't know. It's such a rare thing. I, I, I, when a breeder sent that, that, uh, the shed to me for that and told me what the pairing was. And it was very clear it had, all the genetics had to have come from the sire. Um, then I talked to Dr. Booth

about it. And he knows way more about it than me. That's not something I've dug into. That's all that I learned from them. But I think that the way, at least humans and maybe mammals in general, some of the like the imprinting and the different things that we have that are important for our genetics and development, all that stuff, I don't think it's really possible for that to happen in a human and maybe not in a mammal period but but i don't know but like if you start looking at fish and other stuff like that it could be in in some of those very cool yeah that's just crazy to think of you know yeah it's fun stuff that's great um so another kind of prompter for the uh the show was i was listening to a podcast that was new to me read it had been going for

several years and so this was an aged episode and probably from two and a half three years ago and they said oh dr bren just figured out the desert ghost is actually these three different genes and the interactivity of these you know blah blah blah and so i i heard sort of this explainer i then asked you and you're like yeah well sort of and so two kind of there's that specific question but really as the question of are you aware of genes that operate based on the interaction of multiple gene, like multiple defined genes. I know Nick Button is right has talked about his idea, at least, that the hypo presentation in bretles is actually like, you know, the sequencing of a couple different genes,

something like that. So, yeah, thoughts on those ideas. Yeah, so first of all, with the Desert Ghost thing, we thought at first of all, we had a lot of pressure because that was like, like we had clown, we had pied, that was the next So I'm like everybody wanted a test that would work for that. We had one that kind of worked like 85% of the time, but we weren't going to sell that because, you know, it's not. But all the other tests we have are over 99%.

But we found another marker that was on a different chromosome. And when we looked at the two different markers, then that increased our accuracy more to like 95%. And so we made Desert Ghost available as an elimination test. we call it something different, and we said, you know, there's got to be at least one other mutation that's affecting this. And in the end, there was one other mutation, but it completely controls it. So those other two, the one that's on the same chromosome, it makes sense because of linkage that we're just seeing that because it's nearby. But the one that was on another

chromosome, maybe it helps with color or pattern or some other thing that we're selecting for as breeders who didn't even realize that we were, but it was somehow correlated with Desert Ghost. But once we ran, like, once we had, we got to that point, we're like, hey, we think this is polygenic and, you know, blah, blah, blah. But then we had, we offered to run two free tests for anyone that wanted to. So we ran, I think it was 552, or it was over 550 that we ran for free. And when we did that, we learned, okay, and that's when we found that third mutation.

and then in almost all of those we had a couple that were weird ones but everything was all described by that one so it did act like a simple recessive trait those other two didn't matter but then to go to your other question as far as defined traits that that are part of like a polygenic trait there was a publication i think it came out this year that was talking about i think it was height in humans, and they had found over 10,000 genes that play a part in how tall you're going to be. So, you know, that's it. That's buckets of data from a lot of different researchers over a lot of years to

figure that out. It's definitely possible. And I think I remember, like, in school, reading about ones that, like, are only affected by, like, three, like, something small enough that you could actually find all three and figure out, you know, how much of the trait is predicted by that one part of the genotype or whatever. One that's kind of close to that is Labador Retrievers, so like Black Lab, a Yellow Lab, and Chocolate Lab. That's two different genes on different chromosomes. One of them controls color, and then one controls dilution, I think, is what they call it.

it's really an interaction of two different genes in different places that gives you the yellow, the black, and the brown. So that's one that is technically polygenic because it's more than one. And it's a small enough number. We can know exactly what those are and how to predict it. But in a reptile, I haven't seen that. I definitely like striping and like color in green trees and even in like I think almost the majority of the traits in like, Crested Geckos and Amazon tree be polygamous and stuff like that, they seem to all be polygenic

or almost all be polygenic traits. So they're out there, but how many different genes control like blue versus yellow versus black in a green tree? I would love to have enough money to spend five or ten years on that. That'd be fun. What about like CRISPR and stuff to manipulate that and you know, make an all black green tree python or something. Yeah, that'd be very doable. What they did with the, oh, no, the dire wolf thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah. They're calling a dire wolf. Uh-huh. So to make that a white animal, you know, they found a mutation. And actually, the one that they think they found in the actual dire wolf, they picked a different one because they didn't want to cause hearing problems or something. But, yeah, we're getting to where we know and not.

about color and pattern stuff that, yeah, we could, I haven't looked at like hypo or hyper melanistic stuff yet, but there are some that we know in homozygous state in ball pythons, like super black pastel and super cinnamon stuff like that. We know what gene that's in, and it makes sense that it would add a bunch of that dark color

and take away the pattern. So, yeah, we could do some designer stuff. that'd be kind of fun. That'd be crazy, yeah. I guess, you know, and this isn't meant as a trick. Why didn't you say that before, but it just sort of springs to mind. Whatever happened, so this is back in the time machine,

whatever happened to being able to reproduce the look of the original platinum ball python, right? So it's always the framing was lessers. Whatever was the deal with the sire to those animals that had a different look that, was that ever reproduced? Was there a, you know, a recessive trait that was in combination, you know, Ralph's whole idea of like, oh, it's the normals that are the secret sauce or whatever that whole, whatever happened with that. So, yeah, he was right that the normals. So when he bred a plattie daddy daddy to a normal, half the babies were lessers and half of them looked like normals and none of them look like the plattie daddy. So that's, you know, on its face, that's confusing. Like, why can I reproduce this? And that's, and that's, you know, on its face. That's confusing. Like, why can I reproduce this? And that's why you thought, you know, there must be some recessive thing going on.

Well, what's happened? And we don't have the sequence for this yet because it's hard to find the daddy side of that. There's lots of lessors. But to find plattie datties, people just haven't kept making them because it's kind of a pain. But what's actually happening is plattie daddy, that one gene where lesser is, there must be another sequence that makes it the daddy part. So a plattie daddy has two different blue-eyed lucy complex mutations, but one of them does not make it a white snake. And in the heterozygous form, it just looks like a normal.

And in combination with a lot of other things, it doesn't really do anything. But if you put it with lesser or butter or Mahavi or something like that, you can make a Mahavie daddy or a lesser dattery or a butter daddy. You can do all of those things. But yeah, so that's what happened was he bred platy-dadi, and then he got the lessers in that, but then he decided to breed the lessers to the normals in that. And when he did that, he would make platy-dadi some of the time. And that's because some of those, about a fourth of those offspring, would get the lesser mutation and the daddy mutation, and then you'd get a plattie-daddy-dadi. But, yeah, people just haven't selected for that because it was kind of weird and people didn't understand it.

and I still have people ask about it and I have a few samples probably like five to eight that people have sent in that are daddy samples but I just haven't taken the time to figure out exactly what that sequence is but I definitely want to just because it's kind of interesting and cool but that's an example also a lot of the time people think about like if it's that gene where Mojave and Lesser and butter all those are then people think of that being a gene where it's everything's incomplete dominant and that's not how genetics works in that same gene you can have something that's recessive too or that is only going to show up if it's in combination with something else and so that's the case there if you have just a mutation for daddy and nothing else in the blue ed lucy complex it just looks completely like a normal you can't tell the difference so so you are finding all these hidden genes hidden genes too that one is kind of a hidden one yeah Yeah, that's crazy. So it just lines up, you know, the right way to make that phenotype.

I mean, it seems like there's a few other genes that do that, that look kind of normal, but then they enhance or do they call them enhancer genes or like, you know, diluter genes or whatever they call them. How they interact with another mutation, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like fire and vanilla and, yeah, there's a lot of them that, and even Yellowbelly will kind of. ants things and some comedy yeah so has i'm presuming the answer is no maybe then out of this just based on the complexity the honestly terrible naming is there a double daddy uh you know has that been a homozygous daddy a super daddy yeah that's a good question i don't know if he ever tried for

that um i don't know if he had bred that plattie daddy to any of his normals then he would have had a chance to make that um that's a good question I don't remember, because I did spend a lot of time on Ralph's page because it was kind of during the same time I was doing my dissertation and doing all the stuff with TSC with their animals. So I went through and looked at a lot of his pairings. I don't remember him talking about that at all, whether he got like the super daddy part of that or if he even had a chance at it. I know he bred the lessors to their siblings. I know he did that, and you wouldn't have a chance of that in that pairing. But, yeah, that would be really interesting to breed a platy-dadi to one of those normal offspring

and see if you can get a super daddy. That'd be interesting. Or even the two, you know, the normal siblings got bringing the two siblings together. Yeah. That would be the way to get this super, well, other than breeding into the platy-daddy-daddy. Yeah. All these stupid names, it's hard to have a serious. conversation talking to platty daddy and queen bee and stuff yeah it's crazy yeah uh it's kind of humorous

too all the the politics involved in naming some of these things too but yeah well and that's part of the idea right and how it's super interesting that at least in some of these they are genetically distinct because that became a big part of the conversation was is this just sort of labeling you know is this a marketing gimmick or are they actually different you know and that was get another sort of inherent bias to the analysis, right, or the discussion. Oh, yeah. Definitely. And Lesser and Butter ended up being one of those for a long time, like until like a month or two. I think it's probably about two months ago. We thought lesser and butter were the same. All the samples that came in, some were lessers, some were buters. They all tested the same. But we ended up having a few

come through that were blue-eyed Lucy's, but they did not test for anything on our blue-eyed Lucy complex. except for lesser and so we sequenced and we found out in animals that were purchased directly from the bells they would test negative for the lesser test and we did actually find a butter mutation so it is actually different and in even though the bells have sold tons of those like through pet stores as far as in breeders collections we we know people obviously we only have the sheds that people send for testing right like graders that are sending it in for testing, there's way more lessers than there are butters. But if you are going to like people's you know, houses and testing them, I bet that there's way more butters than lessers. So that's

kind of, kind of a cool thing that. And then in that same complex, you have, you have the phantom and the mystic that a lot of people were confident was different, but they're genetically identical as far as we can see. Unless there's a secondary mutation that travels with it most of the time or something weird like that, definitely the causal mutation is exactly the same. Yeah. Wow. That's loud.

So now I remember the big, you know, the big push like snake, there's no such thing as snake genetics. It's just genetics, but it sounds like there might be some snake genetics going on here. Or you can get recombination in the sex chromosomes. You know, that's not human genetics, but I guess it's all genetic principles. Yeah, that's definitely. You'd never see that in humans. They're extremely weird to see that.

Right, right. That's, I don't know. That's kind of a old, you know, one of those old things, you know. There's no such thing as snake genetics. Old sayings, yeah. Yeah. The cliches. So, slightly changing years.

Are there, do you have any thoughts on basically mutations that are taken to be inherited a dominant mode of inheritance, but in reality? it's sort of actually there's a lethal homozygous form in terms of sorry so yeah the spider

so the mutations in the spider complex spider being one of them Woma champagne there's quite a few of those that are like that that you know sometimes they'll be listed like spider could be listed as a

dominant mutation really it's an incomplete dominant it's heterozygous for a leucistic so when you get a super spider it's all white it's kind of like z or not zebras uh jags in carpet pythons um so you can make a super you can hatch it sometimes they'll even live for a day or two i don't know of any i think there is one that supposedly live for like six or seven days something like that and it might be is that kind of a similar thing as far as jags like yeah you can maybe get in the one chimera right that's survive for some length of time, but presumably that was because at the fundamental point, it was, you know, was not homozygous for the trade. Yeah. So yeah, that definitely

happens in ball pythons. I really, I guess pinstripe, we don't have a test for yet. Well, yeah, so that you're right, you're right on it, right? Because Brian, I know it talks about, I forget it was a male or a female, and this was he'd come on either, it must have been on Reptile radio and he was like he just kind of tossed it out there and this is well after they'd been around you know he just sort of had it oh this is one you know and i forget if it was male or female but he said something like i think there's you know that it's genuinely a dominant mutation because he had you know this is him talking right quoting him he said it was something like he had produced 16 or 20 offspring and all of them were pinstripes and just the odds of that happening by

random chance are so you know and everyone was sort of like again it falls into the oh this is a narrative this is just Brian inventing stuff he's just saying stuff you know no one cares about pinstripe anymore he's got to make it interesting but so with leopard we we were able to prove that to be the case so we do have a leopard test and I've tested many super leopards so and as far as visually you cannot tell a difference people like Justin Cabelka I asked him specifically once we had that I was like, hey, you know, can you tell a difference? And, you know, even on the down low, I don't want to give your secrets away. He's like, no, I can't tell a difference between a leopard and a super leopard.

So, so, yeah, that's the best example I can think of that we know, like, genetically. I've definitely tested it. It was really funny. One of the very first few super leopards I got, I knew the breeder. And so I called them. I was like, hey, I had a couple of years pop, you know, homozygous for leopard. is that possible, like, from the pairing, was there leopard on both sides? He's like, funny you say that.

That clutch is actually hatching right now. Let me slip those. So, like, well, I was on the phone with them. He slit, you know, these eight eggs. He's like, yeah, leopard, leopard, leopard, leopard. He's like, yep, it breeds super leopard also. So, yeah, that one, we're very sure. Pinstrap, I've kind of heard that calico or sugar, you know,

whether people just seem to never breed that on both sides. but I don't know personally. I have a few, but I don't have enough where I ever would have paired them together either, but either a supercalico is lethal and they never, you know, early enough in development, we never see them, they abort or that egg crashes or whatever. Or there is, but people just haven't figured that out, I guess.

But yeah, pinstripe, I've heard that from at least three different people where they feel confident they have a super pin. So we need to get that test, and then we can figure that out for sure. Stranger is another one that may be a legit dominant trait. Wow. Okay. Let's see. Going to page two.

Yeah, so then another sort of complex thing. And I guess here we finally get into suit, you know, suit Justin's fantasy. see we're going to fight a little bit or at least get you going on some maybe some more ethically questionable kind of things that, you know, when we're, you know, listening, a lot of these podcasts, right, are often in the sort of leopard echo context, ballpipe in context, hog nose now probably, you know, in terms of these communities that are heavily focused on mutations. And I know you've been on several of those, several those shows and things. So the question becomes getting into sort of the fact that deleterious straits is we hit on way early, right, exist. In terms of the leper gecko stuff, right, there's the enigma that seems to, there's the neuro functionality on it. It seems like it's probably the same or similar to the spiders slash jag idea. And then there was the lemon frost, right, that created this beautiful appearance, but then brings with it these, what, tumor, eridifor tumor or something like that? That sounds around.

I've read about it. I haven't ever seen or even like, like, watched a. video about it, but I've read about, there's some publications about that lemon frost. Yeah, just sort of wild, right? That there are, you know, so often, and I don't remember if it was you or if it was Nick, you know, or if it was Travis or who was talking about it, but there was, just talking about sort of the rates of, or likelihood of a trait having deleterious side effects, talking about the color mutations versus pattern mutations. And that generally speaking, it seems like color mutations are less likely to be problematic than pattern mutations where you're getting disruptions that are going to disrupt sort of cell location or cellular functionality location?

Yes. Yeah, so I probably talked with Justin about this. This is when I was a grad student, there was a guy that did chicken genetics, and he overheard us talking about this kind of stuff. you know spiders and jags and and what he described to me and now I've read it in several papers but the first time I was exposed to it was as a grad student and so he was describing that in very very early embryonic development the melanocytes are traveling with the neural crest cells and so that's why a lot of the time a change in pattern also is a change in the neurological network. And so if you get this really whacked out pattern, you're also getting this really

whacked out neurological, you know, network set up. Some of those are very bad for the health of the animal. There's also with leucistic animals. So this, I guess you could kind of think of it as being both patterns somewhat and color. But yeah, with lucistic, whether it's mammals or reptiles, it's very common you have hearing problems and or eye, like sometimes you'll get bug eyes or pin eyes. Those are pretty common problems across different, like in dogs, horses, like it's not just reptiles. But yeah, I think that you're right. If you have something that's a color trait, it's less likely to cause problems than a pattern because that pattern difference also the cells that are traveling with it are the

neural cells and so that that neurological network is jacked yeah they did publish recently on the inner ear issues associated with was it jaguar with the I know there's a spider ball python yeah I know that there might be a jag one also you maybe assume it would be the same thing since it's kind of the same same phenotype maybe, but yeah, it's hard to, hard to say for sure. Well, we know where to look, so we'll be looking in other Python species. We'll do carpets as well. I don't know how fast it'll be, but yeah, we'll definitely be sequencing some jags

and looking to see in that same gene if it's a similar mutation, and then we'll know for sure. On the, you know, homologous type, you know, chromosomes, that kind of thing. Yeah, so albinos probably the best example. one of the common ones in humans is Akah 2, and that's what Lavender Albino is in Ball Python's. There's Akatu, mice. So yeah, like, that's why that really early paper on albino, Lavender, albino, and Ultramel, why they were able to find all three of those is because they went to the genes that they know caused albino in, you know, cats and dogs and rats and humans and all that. And so they're able to find those. mutations in those same genes also caused alvino in ball pythons so um we do have a piebald test for blood pythons and that's you know in the same gene as the the or in blood pythons it's the same gene that's the one that ball pythons it's a different mutation a different part of it but yeah so i fully expect yes so you so you reduce the size of your haystack that you're looking for the

needle. Is that the deal? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think it'll be much faster to find. Like, I think if we go through and try to find albino, like, in everything, and Azantic and everything, you know, I think that once we know where to look and we just, you know, get a few animals of each species and we can look in that one gene, then we should be able to find them a lot faster than when we didn't know anything. And I mean, this might be a dumb question or just a clarification, but you can also see, like, if an animal's heterozygous, you can see the gene on one or the other allele. Yeah, yeah. Usually, it depends on how you're sequencing and how deep the sequencing is. Sometimes I'll have bald spots, like, you know, whatever gene I'm really interested in,

if the sequencing doesn't work really well in that area, I might have a bald spot. And I might either have no reads or I might only have a couple reads, and they're both normal looking. But it could still be hit. I just don't have enough reads to, if I have over, you know, 20, then I feel pretty confident. I should see that. So, yeah, it just kind of depends. But once we know where to look, then we can, you know, PCR, just that one spot, then, you know, we'll have a whole bunch of copies we can look at and we can test and see if it's heterozygous or not. But, yeah, that's part of the difficulty when you don't know for sure where you're looking.

Yeah. And you have to just sequence the whole genome and to get that really good, you have to do like, you know, 35 or 50x. and that's, you know, gets expensive to do very many animals that way. Right. Even though sequencing costs have come down. But once you have an idea where to look, then you can amplify just that small part. You go from 1.7 billion base pairs down to even, you know, 10,000. That's a massive, that's a massive improvement in your odds.

For sure. So I'm curious, too, just kind of mechanics of this. Like, if you have 60 different tests, I mean, I'm sure you're getting, you know, samples and do you do you kind of wait for a batch that's you know large enough samples to kind of fill up a thermocir or whatever to before you run the studies or i mean are you telling your customers like okay there's going to be like a week delay or or do you get enough so quickly that it doesn't really delay much um thankfully it wasn't like this at the beginning at the beginning it was what you just said like i would do a run like once a month or once every six

weeks because everything was getting sequenced. And so the only way to do that cheap was to do big batches. But now we're able to, first of all, we have more volume. We have more tests available. So we have more sheds coming in for testing than we did back then. But also, we kind of have two pathways. So if somebody wants to have right now our big panel for morphs for ball pythons, you can get a panel done, you get 48 results. So we have 48 tests that are done. So that we still only do about once a month. So it's like four or five week turnaround for a panel, but you get 48 results.

So if you don't have a clue or if you think, hey, it might have some mutations in here. And honestly, multiple times we've had people that paid big money and then found out the person they bought from wasn't being honest. and so they run panels to find out what all was lied about. So, yeah, so you get a whole bunch of data, but it does take longer because we have to batch them. But I think in the next year or two, we'll be able to cut that turnaround time and half as we keep growing the volume coming through. We can do them faster. The other one, like if you just want one or two or maybe four, even up to like five different tests, we can do that cheap enough where we can we do them most weeks we'll do four uh four days a week

where we'll run everything that comes in and so our turnaround for if you're just getting you know hey is this a heck clown het pie is it pastel you know if there's two or three or four things you want to know then we have a one to two business day turnaround so it's really fast wow and is this like unique primer probe sets or are you doing real-time or QRT-PCR or what are you doing there? Maybe. Yeah, okay. That's a, that's a proprietary information kind of quite. Yeah, I don't want you to.

Yeah. Yeah. It is not all the same. Okay. So some stuff we have to do a little differently because we're doing a lot of different types of mutations. Right. But yeah. Yeah. At least some of what you're talking about.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that was more of my curiosity rather than, yeah, I don't want you to say anything you don't want to say on here. But yeah, that's cool. No worries. But yeah, it's all stuff that we can. Thankfully, we can run, like everything that comes in. Like our busiest day is usually Tuesdays because Monday, they'll just, and this is all in Texas. But yeah, they'll prep everything that came in on Saturday and on Monday. They'll prep everything that came in on Saturday and on Monday. They'll prep all of that on Mondays and so we'll have really big runs on Tuesdays and then then we'll run every day the rest of the week and we can just get through everything people sent in and so it's usually you know a lot of the time it's you know 24 to 30 hours after it gets to us we've already got results up so wow that's really cool you got it down to a science that's awesome got the science down to a science but yeah one thing that jumped out right when you mentioned the context of that the gene location for piball and blood pythons is the same as ball pythons,

but the actual sequencing is different, right? Not that it was a concern in this context, but that's an illustration or proof, right, that it's not a hybrid from a ball python. It's not that the trait was brought over from ball python because the sequence of the mechanism is different, right? So that was, you know, when you said that, it's like, well, that's really cool, you know, to anyone out there, you know, casting doubt or aspersions or whatever. you know, obviously from nothing, but yeah, no. Yeah, yeah, that one is the only one I can say right now, I know. But, yeah, as we do more like pied in berms and pied in their ticks, like we'll be able to tell if it's the exact same mutation as one of the others.

We can't necessarily be evidence that is, you know, right? Yeah. That it could go either way. But if it's different, then it's sort of exclusionary evidence, right? Of saying, okay, well, you know, it's not just the same. But if it is identical. then uh pretty skeptical yeah very skeptical wouldn't you be able to see that like there's you know a mixing of burn and you know the yeah yeah that's what i was going to say that's okay that would that would make

me skeptical enough that i would i would be willing to sequence i would sequence whole genomes of a few and be like oh okay we see this too yeah but yeah the chances of like in that whole genes, some genes are, you know, 60, 70,000 base pairs long or whatever, but to have the exact same mutation pop up two different times is just mind-boggling that that would actually happen. It's much more likely that somebody cross-bred two species and got that mutation in. Right. So if you bred a piebald blood to a piebald ball python, you'd have double heads because it's in different areas? I would imagine

they would still, yeah, I would imagine it still look like a piebald. But I mean, it technically it is it could be affecting a different domain and so maybe you know, maybe it could, the one normal copy

in one spot could make up for the mutation and the normal copy in the other spot could make up for the other one. But I think it would be more likely. Like with Ultramal, we have have two different mutations in two different spots, but if you have a double heterozygote, it looks like a, if you're homozygous for one, homozygous for the other, or have one copy of each, they all look the same to the breeder. We can't tell the difference. So I would imagine that

if you bred the pied blood to the pied ball python, you'd get all pides, but that would be kind of fun to try. Yeah, that's interesting. So another thing that you had mentioned previously when you're talking about the context of the panels, right, running everything that's in there. So it makes me think of, and I'll put it kind of a semi-pin in this, I have a discreet question and then someplace to go. When you're talking about misrepresentations being evidenced by those panels, are those misrepresentations of like inclusion or of omission, right? Because I know in the leopard gecko context, sort of the new wave of, and it's probably true in corn snikes, or at least it's going that way. maybe it's not as the sentimentality of leopard gecko keepers is not quite, you know, of corn say keepers is not the same as leopard gecko keepers, but there's a desire to have

something, you know, no unknown hets or no known heads in these sorts, that just only this stren albino for one type of albino. Yeah, exactly right. You know, and that you're, you know, meanwhile, they, the folks who have validated that information have produced a ton of flooding the market or, you know, flooding into the universe, all these animals that are deliberately, you know, a mixture of both things that then get pushed out into the community. The ethical challenge associated with test breeding compared to your tests and things. But I was just curious, yeah, is that in the ball python thing, were you thinking of, oh, it could, it's a possible head X and it's not?

Or is it, oh, no, no, there's no possibility that albine is in the mix, which of those is it more frequently? It's way more frequent in ball pythons that they didn't get. everything they paid for um and it happened sometimes it happened to justin and i uh that they get something different than what they paid for so uh justin and i and justin has an even longer track record of bad luck with albino stuff but yeah we bought a pair of head albinos and justin you know call i think i can't i think you called me first eventually sent me a picture like what is this thing like it was so weird looking because we were expecting an albinos ended up being a hypo and I guess that guy said that, oh, I guess I mixed him up.

I gave you the hypoes instead of the albino. I don't know what happened. Yeah. But yeah. There's definitely mix-ups that happen. But the one where the big problem was is people buying these animals that are multiple, incomplete dominant things. And then they're supposed to be triple het for, you know,

a pied clown and desert ghost or whatever. But they were either not het for anything or only have one or two out of all the ones that they paid for. So that person, I think the last time I checked is still selling animals. And I don't know. Oh, my goodness. I guess that brings up the other question is, should you be ratting this guy out? You know, like making people aware. I definitely won't.

Yeah. Tell people that I treat it like I'm, you know, their doctor, you know, for their human health. I'm not going to give away. Not going to out their spouse when they give them herpes or whatever. This guy's cheating on his wife. Yeah. If they prefer me to be the one to talk to the breeder, like, you know, sometimes I'll know the breeder better than they do or whatever. You know, I'm happy to do that for them to, you know, be part of that conversation or confrontation or whatever.

But, yeah, I would never, you know, just like start talking to take that up on your stuff. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. You don't need that headache. No. Right. It's a funny industry in some ways, you know, especially when you get into stuff like that. It's like I've seen a few posts recently where, you know, people had paid for snakes and hadn't gotten. And now they're airing and saying, hey, this, you know, this is a problem. And then all of a sudden all these other people are like, oh, yeah, he did that to me too.

And it's like, you know, if only there was a way to prevent that earlier on, you know. Yeah. So, you know, people. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. People that are buying these. you know, five, $10,000 animals now, ball pythons, you know, even if they, they know what it is, there's one guy in Vegas that's bought a whole bunch of stuff, and he's so funny. He just loves, even though he knows what it is, he wants to have it tested and make sure it's what it should be, but, yeah, like, even if you're pretty confident in what the

breeder says, still sometimes weird things happen, like Partho, we had one as actually someone I know really well, a friend of mine, he bought a leopard, het desert ghost, and it came from a pairing. The sire was a desert ghost, a visual homozygous desert ghost. But he had me run stuff for it for other things,

and it just came up, like, completely negative for desert ghost. And in the end, when we found out that actually this is another time with the super leopard thing, the female was a leopard. And when we ran this animal, it was a super leopard and it was negative for desert ghost and the female didn't have desert

ghost in it at all and so that's when we figured out yeah you you got parthode bro so there's there's no desert ghost there even though it has to be because the sire it was the only sire in there it has to be desert ghosts well it's not desert ghost it's it's a partho so we did a whole genome on it and showed yeah the heterozygosity is crap you know you definitely got a partho wow well i guess yeah i guess you got to keep that in mind when you're because yeah you could go in slander this guy and he's like no I paired these two together you know yeah you got to be careful I guess yeah it's it's an honest mistake right right and he was really mad and you know talking about how bad yeah genetic testing is and all the stuff

I'm like you know I think in the end he believed us and I wrote him a nice thing I was like hey you know if you see this in this coach if you see this like these are the things that you need to worry may not have desert ghost in him if you see this then you know like if it's a it's good right this of that then you're good but these are the things if they're not there or if you have those then they might not have desert ghost in them and right yeah i guess that could be you know for both for both the buyer and the seller like they could both be mad at you like you're giving them these results and you're screwing my business buddy and i know i know yeah and we've had several sometimes people send their azantics because they're we can test for three

different lines of Azanthic and ball pythons. And so they'll send them in and they think that it's one. We're like, it's completely negative. Like, well, I bred them. It's an Azanthic male that I bred to it. But then we run the other two. Like, oh, it's, it's not VPI. It's TSC or whatever, you know. So that's happened. And so, yeah, fun stuff. Keeps you on your toes, I'm sure. Yeah. Hopefully that makes it easier for the stuff that happens down the road. You know, he like, oh, this happened before, I know how to answer this, or I know what to test for to, you know, verify what's going on.

Yeah. Tricky stuff. In terms of designing tests for the cornstank mutations, how are you kind of coming to pick which mutations you're doing? And is that kind of, do you see any market for that moving in the vein of sort of the leopard gecko, no, you know, no unknown head sort of ideal where they just want it to be sort of only this thing and not just, you know, the random pet store of corn snake could run the panel on that. It could be anything, right, almost.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I definitely have heard breeders talk about that more in corn snakes. They're more, you know, they would rather it be just this and not that kind of a thing. Ball Python breeders in general just want everything they can so far. I'm sure at some point that will change, but except for pastime. The market matures to a point where, yeah, it's like. Yeah, with pastel, sometimes people do test because they want to make sure they have a pastel, not a super pastel. So if it's a super pastel, they know everything they make is going to have pastel.

And so sometimes they'll choose that so they can, you know, not get the super. But yeah, I think, and as far as corn snakes, like the cool thing with them is there's been some really good work where they've also CRISPRed some of these mutations. Um, so, uh, scaleless and striped. And I think maybe one other one, but not only did these researchers find the mutation that causes it, uh, but they also went in in CRISPRdom and generated animals that had the same phenotype. Um, so that was pretty cool. Uh, they've done some really cool working corn snakes. Yeah. Um, so that's helped. Uh, but yeah, as far as choosing, uh, really what we do is we do is we, talk to breeders and say hey what's going to be most helpful we look at morph market and see you know if there's a truckload of this or that on there like in ball pythons pastel you know uh you know whatever it's all around you know people aren't maybe necessarily excited about a pastel test you can tell it a lot of the time but there's so many pastels out there we do actually have a lot of people that want to test for pastel so you know we kind of look and see what's on morph market and then and then ask breeders what would help you the most. And then that's kind of,

we usually have like a top 10 list that we're working through. Very cool. Yeah. That's incredible. I was curious to, you know, this has been a while back when they discovered the, or sequenced or identified the virus that causes IBD. And at the time,

like only a couple reptiles had been sequenced, species. I think boa constrictors had recently been sequenced and that's what allowed them to find that viral sequence in among the, you know, the boa sequence. They could rule out what was boa constrictor and what wasn't kind of thing. It's when they had the full boa sequence. Is that still a problem or have lots of different species been sequenced to the full, you know, genome or large part of the genome at this point? I think there are, I know snakes better than like reptiles in general. Sure.

Yeah. In snakes, I think there's a chromosome level, Thamnophis and Elaphethi. So I think it's corn snake and garter snake, that there's chromosome level. But some of the bioinformatics people we've been talking to said that it's still, there's a big difference between. main whole genomes that are built only with short read or alumina stuff versus ones where you do some short read and some long read. Okay. So the bioinformatics people don't like the ones that are generated with only short read.

I think that there are very few reptile genomes that have long read also. Okay. There can be some chromosome-level ones that are okay, but like a really good one. Like we spent, I think for us back when we did it, we probably spent between $40,000 and $50,000 doing a whole male ball python genome and a whole female ball python genome. Very, very deep and with lots of long read to help make sure everything got, you know, put in the right order. Yeah.

So it's really expensive. And it's hard to get the money to pay for that in reptiles because we're not feeding people with reptiles. Yeah, that is a challenging thing. I'm just so impressed with how much you guys have done and what you've come up with. It's really just impressive, really cool. Yeah, congratulations. It's been a fun ride. Yeah, right.

Nice. But yeah, sequencing is getting. cheaper over time so maybe another five or ten years it'll be even easier i hope that'll be the case and right but it's definitely slowly like 10 years ago versus five years ago versus now we're we're getting more happening in reptiles but but it is still difficult to have a really high quality deep long read whole genome yeah that's i think i'm i'm really impressed with the fact that they can, you know, CRISPR a corn snake and, you know, they've developed those techniques to, you know, however they're doing that. I imagine it's got to be at the single stealth stage or, you know,

the egg and sperm stage, or can they modify once, you know, it's developed a little bit? So the way they are doing that, I actually was reading that here fairly recently, they're doing a surgery and they're going in in the egg stage. So they're going into follicles that are, I believe they're pre-vitogenic. So they're not vitalogenic yet. So this is like at a stage, like if you're ultrasounding, they probably still look like a water balloon. They're not starting to go white yet. But what they're doing is doing a surgery, cutting open, going in and injecting the egg. So in that case, you're only going to potentially make a hit. And then you, what they were doing is they would go in, since this is a mutation that they already, you know, have a bunch of

scaleless or stripes corn snakes. So they could go in, take a normal female that they know is not for stripe. They would cut her open, inject, and then breed her to a stripe. And then they could see how many of the babies were stripes. Right. And they know that had to have come. And then obviously they can do the sequencing to, you know, triple check to make sure it's their edit that got in. Wow. That's cool.

But the other really cool thing they've done, I don't know if you guys saw this, Beth Roberts at the Memphis Zoo. Did you see their AI? They're able to get a sperm sample and store it and then do AI. And they're working with Louisiana pine snakes. Oh, cool. So that's pretty cool, yeah. Yeah. I'd seen some AI who had been done, you know, in the past for different species,

but it seems pretty rare and difficult. You know, it's not, I guess, any time you take a new species, I know like a researcher at Utah State, Dr. Wang, he's working with hamsters. And apparently, CRISPR on hamsters is not like mice. It's very difficult and very, yeah, very challenging and all the different things. things he has to do to get that to worry. He's one of the only people in the world that has gotten it to work and gotten transgeny hamsters through CRISPRCast 9.

So, you know, you would think, oh, a hamster is just a big mouse, you know, no problem. But, yeah, it's completely different. So, yeah, it's cool to see these things work and people developing different strategies, especially in regards to, you know, endangered species or, you know, extinct species, the idea of bringing something back if it's gone extinct is kind of cool. Yeah, fun stuff for sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's getting late for you.

I don't know if Rob has any more burning questions. Yeah, so my last question, and we've just been in this same sort of circle, is do you have any personal thoughts on like the green fluorescent protein put into axolotles or the glowfish, just in terms of, you know, as animals that are now out in the hop, But you got a PetSmart, right? And they have these glow Danios, and there's pink ones and orange ones and green ones. And as I say, the glowing green oxaladles that are just, they're cool, man. You know, as much as it's sort of antithetical to a lot of, you know, my fundamental beliefs, they're pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, as a, you know, someone that's done a lot of gene editing, I think it's cool and interesting. And I can see why a lot of people like it. I've seen, you know, even a natural thing like, how. having a scorpion and just turn a black light on, like if you're, you know, at someone's house at a party and people are hanging out and you do that. Everyone's like, oh, you know, like if you can have it be, some of them be pink and some of them be green, some of them be red, like that's even better, you know. But yeah, I mean, the studies, like we, we had to do some

FDA stuff for, you know, genes we're putting in and some of them were GFP and stuff like that. And, you know, all the safety stuff, it seems like it's not, you know, it seems pretty dang safe and to not cause a problem for the animal. But I've never done the studies myself or looked at it myself. You never know if they're, you know, saying that because they want to make them. But I think that there's enough done by enough different people that it's a very safe thing. So I don't think it is really affecting the well-being of the animal, except for maybe the type of person. that would buy it is maybe going to handle it differently than if it wasn't a glow snake or a glow fish or a glow whatever. That's the reason why I would be a little hesitant. I think I would be

happy to help somebody else do it, but I wouldn't want to be the face of that. Right. Well, it seems like the, you know, like a GFP, it was more of a research tool, like kind of like using a morph as a marker of how different traits or different modes of inheritance or whatever, you know, you're using that as a marker for another question that's more genetic or at the genetic level. So, you know, that's why we used it was, yeah, you know, we would have GFP link to whatever protein was important for us. Right.

We saw some GFP. We knew our other one was there too, you know. Yeah. And it supposedly isn't causing any problem. but it makes it easier for us to select and move forward. Exactly. Yeah. And so we're just lucky that we have all these crazy mutations popping up in, you know, in nature and that we can find all these cool things about what's going on in our reptiles.

So I don't know. It's pretty amazing. And, you know, adding those, you know, experimentally is maybe, you know, similar to finding a morph in the wild to some extent, I guess. I guess they're not generating jellyfish glow goo, whatever you want to feel. Luciferase in their genome. But I guess it's, was it you that I would usually say, you know, it's snakes in boxes. We're not, you know, we're not rewilding.

We're not doing anything that's conservation. So, yeah, I remember having that talk with many times. Yeah, I still get a. kick out of the thought of once you remove it from nature, is it even the same species, you know, because you've removed its evolutionary trajectory and you're selecting who it breeds with. So it's no longer a part of the, and it's drifting, you know, it's moving away from the species. So can you even call it that species? I think that's such a fun, you know, experimental thought process to, you know.

Yeah, to me, that's the biggest difference to me, like personally. And I can understand people having other opinions and the conversation and I like being a part of it. But like to me personally, like as soon as you're making a breeding decision for an animal, that's not a natural species anymore. To me, that's not pure. That's not wild. That's not like a low. Like if you say something's a locality, I can still feel comfortable with that. Sure.

But like, you know. Saying it's a pure species. Yeah, I mean, a human made that breeding decision. Oh, right, yeah. It doesn't seem wild to me anymore. It doesn't seem pure to me anymore. And you're not letting predators pick off the, you know, the weak genetic or the ones that stand out or, you know, the ones that blend in are not surviving longer to produce more that fit better in the environment. So, yeah.

And spoiler alert, guess what happens when you preserve the parts of the species that don't have strong traits, you get a decrease in. reproductive rates you have fertility problems right happen into humans right you found the thing but i i would do the same thing if it's my kid i'm i'm going to do everything i can to keep them alive so right yeah uh that's interesting i thought about too uh you know asking you about inbreeding and things like that but yeah we will save that for another another day because you know that that idea of how genetics play a role in that, you know, if you have strong and balanced genetics and there's no deleterious things, then inbreeding's not such a big deal, you know. Yeah, if you're optimized for the environment you're in, then asexual reproduction is great.

Yeah, yeah, right. If things change, that's when, if you have a long generation interval and things change, that's a bad mix. Yeah, no, that's true. And then they disappear. Yes, we just went and saw the new Jurassic Park. That's it. Regardless of how crappy the acting or the story or the plot is or the plot holes,

it's still just freaking cool to see dinosaurs on the big screen. I just have to see those movies, you know, in the theaters. But, you know, thinking about all the species that have lived on Earth, most of them are extinct. You know, they're not still here. We have a fossil record of some. And that was one thing I was going to kind of mention, I ran across this study where they found these little reptile species in, it was a pretty full fossil, you know, and it's like a, what, a four-inch little lizard, but it has these huge, like, fins or appendages off of its back. what was it called it's uh and i i think um miss mirasara gravogelly so it's like a triassic um little reptile

but kind of interesting they just you know discovered a full thing and show that it's these uh scale you know or or hyoid appendages that's come out of the back kind of interesting things yeah i may have some of those terms wrong, but yeah, it's paleontology is not my strong suit necessarily, but yeah, it's really cool to see that, you know. Thinking about all the diversity of reptiles that we missed out on,

I guess that fits in with the topic a little bit, but yeah, cool stuff. That's cool stuff. And I'm the same way. I haven't seen that newest Jurassic Jurassic World now, but yeah, I have to watch them. Whenever people ask me, like, what my favorite movie is,

or especially if they say, like, most impact definitely a Jurassic Park. Right. There's nothing that was emotionally impactful, like that scene when they see them the first time. And then in the Jeep, there's no movie that's ever affected me like that part. It's like, that would be so awesome.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, well, I wonder, you know, down the road if that'll be a possibility, if we'll be able to resurrect a species like they did in that movie, you know. It's probably not the same background right now. Well, right now, the people that do that, they're saying that, you know, once you're past, I think, like, a million years, like being able to, the DNA is so fragmented, no matter how it's been preserved or whatever, you just can't get enough to be able to piece it together. But like we said earlier, that's what science is, as we figure out that what we thought before was wrong.

So, right. Yeah. I mean, you know, the dire world kind of misreferial. represented itself a little bit where we have dire wolves well kind of you've got a percentage of a dire wolf yeah so yeah that's a fun conversation too but yeah interesting and and it's cool some of the stuff they did is definitely groundbreaking but yeah on it straight a dire wolf with a straight face is weird to me yeah right well uh thanks so much for coming on then it's uh it's it's It's really awesome to have such an expert in genetics and being able to pick your brain for a couple hours here. And just really appreciate your time and effort to help us understand what's going on with our snakes in boxes. Yeah, we appreciate it.

It's been the one being on. And our pre-conversation, I definitely, I hope in the next year or two, I'll be able to go on some of the field herping trips. I definitely miss doing that. Yeah. It's been something that I haven't done very much of that I would love to do again. Yeah, some great memories herping with you. So I've got to make that happen again sometime soon before we get too old to lift logs and stuff. Where can people find your information?

I mean, if they're living under a rock and don't know about RGI at this point, you know, where can they find you? Um, the best, best place to like see what we're doing and, uh, contact us would be through Instagram or Facebook. Um, we do have a website. You can to previously, we only had our tests available through morph market and clutch, but now you can actually buy tests directly from our rare genetics inc.com website. Um, cool. And then, uh, we do have every Tuesday night at 7 p.m. Eastern. We have a YouTube show, Reptile Genetics Weekly, that goes up. So those are the best places to see us. What's going on? And as far as getting in touch with us, just messaging on Facebook or Instagram is a really good way to get us. Nice. Yeah, I've watched a few, a handful of your shows and

just go over cool topics and talk about, you know, what's going on in the world of Reptile Genetics. It's really cool stuff. So check it out. Yeah. All right. Well, Again, thanks for coming on, and we'll thank Eric and Owen and the Raleigh-Python radio team, and we'll see you next week.