# Strange colours from albinos!!!



## mousery_girl (Nov 13, 2011)

Recently bought some lab mice off a breeder, he started with albinos and all these colours cropped up chocolate black, yellow even a hairless! How can this be?!


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## Rhasputin (Feb 21, 2010)

I've mentioned to people before that you can sometimes get non albinos from albinos, I'm not crazy!

As for how or why it chooses to happen sometimes, but not often, I have no earthly idea. 
I do know though, that hairless overrides albino.


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## Laigaie (Mar 7, 2011)

What appear to be albino (pink-eyed white mice) often are not albinos (c/c). Was he breeding the pew lab mice only with eachother, or was he breeding them in with other stock?

If it was only inbreeding to others from the group of lab mice, he got mice from multiple strains (lines). Some of those were not c/c (albino), but actually one of the many other varieties simply looks the same. For example, many c-diluted pink-eyed mice appear to be pew simply because the pink-eyed dilution and the c-dilutions add up to a very very pale mouse, one who appears albino. Sometimes, the super-pink eyes of a pew are a different shade than these, but not always. If you had c/c P/P mice and c/ce p/p might add up to c/ce P/p mice, but you still wouldn't get full-on black mice, unless one of those white-furred pink-eyed mice was somehow C/*.

The only way I know of to get C/* mice with all-white fur is to have piebald mice with no color. So, say, your black-and-white spotted mice are bred over generations to get the right k-factors until you have all-white mice. In that case, the mice might've been C/* p/p s/s, with the s/s contributing the all-white fur, and the p/p contributing the pink eyes. Bred to true pews, you'd get C/c P/p S/s, giving you full-color, black-eyed, self mice.

If, however, he bred the lab-bred mice to his own non-pew mice, your answer is easy. Albino is recessive. If he bred the lab-bred mice to his true c/c albinos, then the lab mice weren't true c/c albinos. As for the hairless, it's unlikely that a good lab strain would be carrying it, as those are generally inbred enough to eradicate unnecessary recessives. It's possible, however, that these mice were produced by a deliberate outcross, say between a hairless strain and a non-hairless strain, for some type of research that required heterozygosity for that allele.

Really, at this point, I'd question the breeder about his acquisition of the mice. Does he know which strain(s) he has? That would give you a great deal of information about how this happened.


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## sys15 (Nov 26, 2011)

i don't know if different albino loci have been identified in mice (i'd guess so, given all the lab attention, but i'm just not aware of the literature), but is possible to have albino that are the result of different mutations. a mutation at any location along the pathway to produce melanin can completely impair melanin production, resulting in an albino - thus different albinos can be non-compatible and you can breed two albinos together and get neonates that are het for both albino genes.

i feel like i explained that very poorly, but hopefully you get the idea.


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## Laigaie (Mar 7, 2011)

For herps, that would be a great explanation, but it's highly unlikely for mice, where albino is c/c.


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## sys15 (Nov 26, 2011)

Laigaie said:


> For herps, that would be a great explanation, but it's highly unlikely for mice, where albino is c/c.


that's just a way of annotating the albino locus. it doesn't imply that all albinos are the result of the same mutation. in fact, i just googled it, and came up with this paper from 30 years back, suggesting that at that time, some 28 mutations were known (although 26 were lethal). i'm sure there is much more recent literature available.

http://www.genetics.org/content/92/1/205.full.pdf


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## Rhasputin (Feb 21, 2010)

If you go to JAX and search for phenotypes, there are -tons- of albino mutations. Hmm. . .


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## Laigaie (Mar 7, 2011)

C-dilutes are compounding, rather than either-or. If those are different types of c, they generally add their affects together, rather than the more dominant ones being visible and the more recessive ones being carried. While I understand exactly what c means as opposed to C, I also know what it means as opposed to c^h, c^ch, c^e, etc. There are an awful lot of c-dilutions, and they all do basically different versions of the same thing. It's certainly possible we have c^1 and c^2 and c^3, and that we all call them just c because they all act the same. Given that they act the same and are at the same locus, however, it really doesn't matter if they're actually different at a genetic level. From a mousebreeding standpoint, a c^1/c^1 mouse will look the same as a c^1/c^2 mouse. Having multiple types of non-lethal no-side-affects albinism at the same locus doesn't really change anything. It only changes things significantly if you're looking at something that's lethal, has major side-affects, or isn't actually at the C locus.

Again, I suggest you ask the guy who got your mice where he got them, and what he knows about them. If they're lab mice, detailed information on the strain(s) is very very easy to get your hands on, once you know what it is. There are a lot more things available in lab mice than in hobby mice, and you won't be able to get information on that until you know what you've got. If he did give you non-c-locus albinos, I'd be very very careful. From what I can see on JAX, the vast majority if not all of non-c-locus albino mice have serious health problems, from fused hind feet to blindness to developmental issues. When dealing with lab mice, it's exceptionally important to know what you're dealing with before you needlessly bring into the world mice with major health problems, and breed those problems into your lines.


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