Rabbit genetic testing interest?

[kusanar314]

I was thinking I would need to find specific primers that would allow recessive genes of interest to be identified. Like maybe wideband, steel, albino, harlequin or Vienna.

Primers are cheap, a PCR machine is within reach ($1500 used), a gel tank and reagents are cheap, I have the skills to do it safely...I can design primers pretty well if I can find a published full sequence for the gene variant of interest. That is the research I have not had time to do. I need to look at the genes someone would be interested in paying for, and I would need to find out which genes can be PCR tested, and I strongly suspect there is a whole list out there but I have not had time to dig for it.

I could not afford the equipment to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms though. It would only work for genes that have a significant difference between the dominant and recessive allele.

I've been hearing "science nerds" talking about how they are starting to do DNA testing on snake sheds to identify color patterns on ball pythons (they have like 300 color morphs and you can stack pretty much as many as you want on 1 snake so it gets hard to ID by eye) and what they are doing is getting snakes with known genes and fairly few genes and testing them, finding out where they are the same or different and identifying the different gene locations that way since they don't have anything to start from.

They were able to use albino that they were able to pull from other species so they would know what to look for and roughly where, but the other nonsense that they have isn't found anywhere else so they are having to work blind.

 

[TomO]

@eco2pia This is quite exciting. It sounds like you've got the background and skill set for this arena. I know you can't publicize everything in an open forum, but I'm extremely interested in how you would go about determining a market viability assessment for this venture. Anyway, I'm rooting for you!