Mini Lop and Netherland Dwarf Genetics Explained
Or at least tried to. Please if this helps someone let me know and if you can see a way to make it better or have questions contact me.
First the color genes....
Coat colors are a whole hobby unto them self. You could spend most of your life trying to figure them out and still get surprised now and then. Here is my feeble attempt to portray what I know about colors and hopefully help others that care to know more about them understand them better. This does not cover every gene known to man but covers the basics in Mini Lops and Netherland Dwarfs. It doesn't cover things like fur type such as Satin, Rex, Angora and patterns not recognized in Mini Lops and Netherland Dwarfs. I've been studying this for a few years now and sometimes feel as though I've made little progress so bear with me. Email me if I have my facts messed up. Enjoy.
The Letters of the Alphabet....
Ok so you are interested in genetics and knowing what colors bred together will result in a specific color or what specific colors will result in what possible combinations. Maybe you've had something surprising pop up in a litter and don't have a clue what it is so you start to try to figure out genetics. If you are like me when you start seeing things like A_bbc(chl)_D_ee your brain normally switches to off and you get overwhelmed trying to make sense of it all. It's actually not that complicated once you get a basic understanding of the different letters, what they represent and how they work. By now I'm sure you know the order of the alphabet, especially since you are reading this... so therefore I can answer the first question. Why did they pick A, B, C, D and E for letters? Well simply because they wanted to start at the beginning and make this as easy and as painless a system for figuring out genetics as possible. They just picked the first 5 letters of the alphabet because they were convienent. Don't switch to another page now. Understanding these letters really is quite easy once you look into it. If you don't understand any better after reading this page don't give up just try another page on someone else's site that may be explained better. Let's jump into the alphabet soup and start at the very beginning with none other then the letter A.
The A Series....
The coat pattern
The A genes represent the Agouti coloring of a rabbit. Wild rabbits are all Chestnut Agoutis. Their coat color is completely dominant. If you blow into their fur you will see rings of color. Starting with white, going to orange, then brown and then black. This is what is referred to as agouti. Agouti is banded colors on the hair shaft from the skin to the tip that form rings when the fur is blown on. The dominant genes are represented by capital letters. Therefore the capital "A" represents agouti. A lowercase "a" however represents a self color. Self is where the color is usually just one solid color. There is no banding noticeable.
Now I'm going to add a gene you rarely see in Mini lops but you see often in Netherland dwarfs. It is the tan pattern gene which is denoted by they symbol "at". Rabbits with this gene as dominant result in either a tan, otter or marten colored rabbit. These colors are not showable in Mini Lops but are showable and extremely common in Dwarfs. The "at" gene is dominant to the "a" self gene but it is recessive to the agouti "A" gene.
Of course it's slightly more complicated then just "A", "at" and "a". Genes come in sets of two. One from the father and one from the mother. So every rabbit has a set of two of the A series genes. Here is what they can look like. AA, Aa and aa for Mini Lops and AA, Aat, Aa, atat, ata and aa for the Dwarfs. If you do not know what the gene really is the underscore sign is often used in place of an unknown gene. Therefore most agouti rabbits are represented as A_. We know they are Agouti so therefore they have to have at least one dominant Agouti gene "A" but we do not know beyond that what the second gene is unless we look at their pedigrees and their offspring. They could carry the recessive "a" gene or the "at" gene from one of their parents but you will not know that unless you breed them and get completely recessive babies or if one of the parents was completely recessive. If they did it would look like "Aa". If they had a baby that was one of the tan pattern colors when bred to a self colored rabbit then they are "Aat". If you are raising Mini Lops you don't need to worry about the "at" gene because only a few breeders raise Mini Lops with those colors since they are unshowable.
If you get a rabbit that is a recessive self color then it always has two recessive genes. If it had one recessive and one dominant gene the dominant gene would always show. For sake of making it easy to understand, the dominant genes always comes before the recessive genes in the genetic code when written. Therefore their capital and lowercase letters that represent them have the same rule. You will never see an Agouti rabbit that carries the recessive self gene written as "aA". It will always be "Aa". Where the tan pattern gene "at" is dominant to the "a" gene it is also put before that gene if a rabbit has both. You will never have a tan patterned rabbit that has the agouti gene "A" because the agouti pattern is dominant. You could have an agouti "A" however that carries the tan gene "at" or "a" but you wouldn't be able to see it.
Here is a list of what I hopefully have been able to describe with satisfactory results.
A = Agouti (Dominant to all genes)
at = Tan (Dominant to "a" gene, Recessive to "A" gene)
a = Self (Recessive to all genes)
AA = Agouti (Completely dominant agouti)
Aat= Agouti (One dominant agouti gene, One recessive tan gene)
Aa = Agouti (One dominant agouti gene, One recessive self gene)
atat = Tan Pattern (Two tan pattern genes)
ata = Tan Pattern (One tan pattern gene, one recessive self gene)
aa = Self (Totally recessive self)
The following are the only combinations that you can tell from looking at a rabbit, the "hidden" gene demarked by the underscore is only revealed through the ancestors and offspring of the animal in question. Breed is also a telling indication. If you have a Mini Lop you can bet that the tan gene is not a hidden gene. If you have Netherland Dwarfs or another breed that recognized the tan gene then you will have to find out by the pedigree and offspring. A recessive genetic trait has sometimes been known to hide for up to 100 generations so you might never know what can pop up if you don't do test breedings to find out those hidden genes. If you have a self rabbit then you know that there are no hidden genes because all other genes are dominant to the self gene.
A_
at_
aa
Here is a list of what you would get when breeding different combinations of the genes above.
Mini Lops
AA = Full Agouti
Aa = Agouti carrying self
aa = Self
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: AA = All offspring AA
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: Aa = Half of offspring AA and half Aa.
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: aa = All offspring Aa.
Parent 1: Aa X Parent 2: Aa = Quarter offspring AA, half Aa and quarter aa.
Parent 1: Aa X Parent 2: aa = Half offspring Aa, half aa.
Parent 1: aa X Parent 2: aa = All offspring aa.
Netherland Dwarfs
AA = Full Agouti
Aat = Agouti carrying Tan
Aa = Agouti carrying Self
atat = Full Tan
ata = Tan carrying Self
aa = Self
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: AA = All offspring AA
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: Aat = Half of offspring AA and half Aat
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: Aa = Half of offspring AA and half Aa.
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: atat = All Aat.
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: ata = Half Aa and half Aat.
Parent 1: AA X Parent 2: aa = All offspring Aa.
Parent 1: Aat X Parent 2: Aat = Half Aat, quarter AA and quarter atat
Parent 1: Aat X Parent 2: Aa = Quarter offspring AA, quarter Aat, quarter Aa and quarter ata.
Parent 1: Aat X Parent 2: atat = Half Aat, half atat
Parent 1: Aat X Parent 2: ata = Quarter Aat, quarter Aa, quarter atat and quarter ata
Parent 1: Aat X Parent 2: aa = Half Aa, half ata
Parent 1: Aa X Parent 2: Aat =Quarter AA, quarter Aat, quarter Aa, quarter ata
Parent 1: Aa X Parent 2: Aa = Quarter offspring AA, half Aa and quarter aa.
Parent 1: Aa X Parent 2: ata = Quarter Aat, quarter Aa, quarter ata, quarter aa.
Parent 1: Aa X Parent 2: aa = Half offspring Aa, half aa.
Parent 1: aa X Parent 2: aa = All offspring aa.
I think I covered them all. I hope you aren't throughly confused.
On to Punnet Squares to reduce confusion.
Another less confusing way to look at all this is through the use of a tool called "Punnet squares". You may have used these in high school or college if you've had the privalege of taking biology or a similar class. Use them with all of the different genes in the future. Here is an example below of how they work.
In box 1 we first enter parent 1's genes (Highlighted in Red). In this case parent one is "Aa" (One dominant agouti gene and one recessive self gene).
In box two we entered Parent 2's genes (Now highlighted in red). For sake of demonstration this parent will also be "Aa" (One dominant agouti gene and one recessive self gene).
In box three we now take parent 1's genes and copy them to the right to show the first set of genes the offspring will have.
Now we move on to box 4 to get our final results and add the second parents genes. (And remember to keep those dominant capital letters in front of those recessive lowercase ones.)
The final outcome is a quarter of the offspring will be AA (completely dominant agouti genes), half will be Aa (One dominant agouti and one recessive self gene) and a quarter will be aa (Completely recessive self).
Use this Punnet Square technique with all the genetics. It works with them.
Here is an example of all the A gene genetics you can get other then tan coat patterns. You can use this with any color gene as well as most other genes including dwarf genes, fur type genes. etc.