HGG Community Forums

On your DP question, yes you can get chocolate palomino from that cross, if the palomino has sooty. A chocolate palomino has to be ee CcrC SstySty and have DP.

Another way to look at the situation of genes that have a potential of being lethal is to say that a foal has to receive a copy of the gene with the lethal mutation from both parents in order for the foal to fail to live.

A potentially lethal mutation is one that breaks a gene so severely that, if an embryo does not receive at least 1 copy of the unbroken gene, that gene will be unable to perform the function that it should in the development of the embryo and the embryo will die before it develops very far, or, as in the case of the Olw, frame, gene, will be born with a system incomplete so that the newborn foal cannot survive.

Each parent has two copies of the gene, one that has the lethal mutation and one that doesn't. Each time you breed a mare or a stallion with one copy of a lethal mutation, there is a 50% chance that each of them will pass on that copy, and a 50% chance that each of them will pass on the copy without the lethal mutation.

So it is possible to be really lucky and have both parents pass on the intact, unbroken, non-lethal copy of the gene, or ordinarily lucky and have only one parent pass on a broken copy. Or you can be unlucky and have both parents pass on the broken form of the gene, which kills the foal.

There are four possible results--both copies normal, broken gene from the sire, broken gene from the dam, both copies broken. One chance in four that the foal gets two normal copies, two chances in four that it gets a single broken copy, and one chance in four that it gets two broken copies.

This has been the normal state of the game, but there have been some changes due to ongoing work Ammit has been doing with the image generator and the creation of new variations of the Kit gene (the addition of new kinds of White Spotting) that have interfered with the normal pattern in some cases.

Ammit has also said, as I understand it, that when she is done redoing all of the variations of the Kit gene the potential for a lethal combination will depend on the amount of white displayed by each parent, since the amount of white is an indication of how severely broken the gene copy is. How this will work is a mystery to my, but when Ammit has finished the programming, I'm sure she will have a way to help us understand the new potential results.