As Thomas noted, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, George Mallory replied “Because it is there”.
Put boundaries in place and people will just see those as a challenge to circumvent. Genetic engineering/manipulation is basically no different than computer programming. There are, in theory, boundaries in place to not create malicious computer code, and yet there are more than enough hackers out there that create nasty little viruses and trojans and worms and the like. Biohackers are already tinkering with things in their basements/garages without any oversight. Some are even self-experimenting…
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To somewhat roughly continue this discussion.
Would a company along the lines of 23&Me be at all useful in building a Ball Python genome?
Or even a lab with huge resources like HudsonAlpha?
If I (or 100 of us) sent them a test tube of snake saliva or blood, could they do anything that would help us understand certain morphs more?
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I think the main issue here is cost. To sequence an entire genome is roughly $1000. To build a reference genome of a normal/WT we’d have to sequence a bunch of snakes that were were sure were “normal/WT” and then use that as a reference. Then for every morph we wanted we’d have to sequence a bunch of single Mojave’s, then a whole bunch of single gene lessers, then a whole bunch mystics, etc and compare them against the reference to find the causative mutation while weeding out random SNPs and genomic rearrangements. It’s a lot.
I have a few friends who are working on the DNA zoo project - https://www.dnazoo.org and have thought about asking them to generate the sequence of a normal ball python for me, but haven’t bothered yet.
Finding a lab capable isn’t a problem, it’s funding the project. My school has one of the best sequencing centers in the US, so if someone wants to send me $100,000, I’ll walk some samples over today
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There is already a draft ball genome out there. It is not annotated though, and I am not sure it is fully scaffolded…
But yeah, just having the base genome is not enough, you would have to find the locus for every major morph/complex. But as @chesterhf said, that takes $$$
And then what do you do with all the info?
Once you have the loci, you could set up a real simple PCR panel to test for het status on things, but I am not sure if that would really be worth it in the long run: I do not see breeders spending hundreds of dollars to screen poss hets to find out which are or are not just so they can sell them as 100% het, it would be more economical to just sell them as poss hets.
The only other place I could see it being useful would be for clearing up things like allelic complexes, but even then, we already can do that way cheaper. Are Spider and Spotnose actually allelic?? Run the PCR and find out… Or just make the Blackhead/Spotnose combo and bred it out a few times and see if you only get clutches of Blackhead and Spotnose but no combo and no normals.
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