Congratulations are due to Fred Petrij, Karin van Veen, Vera Brückmann,
who have all posted here frequently in the past, and Michael Mettler,
the well known German animal writer. (AKA The Gerbil Genetics Group)
At long last their gerbil genetics paper -
A Second Acromelanistic Allelomorph at the Albino Locus of the Mongolian
Gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus).
has been published in the Journal of Heredity (Vol92-1 p74-78).
I was in the British library the other day and thought it must be out by
now as I saw it in draft well over a year ago! It looks very nice with
some lovely black and white photographs. Don't worry about the title,
the paper is less complicated than it appears. After all, the title
really just means "Another mutation at the C locus" and describes what
we call the Burmese Gene, c[b], and the colours produced from it. The
paper also has a useful summary of all published papers on gerbil colour
genetics to date.
The only fly in the ointment is that the GGG has shown that the mutation
is not the same one as Burmese in cats and that it is much more like
Middle Chinchilla in rabbits. This means that they have used the more
complicated symbol c[chm] to stay consistent with existing literature.
Even so, I am sure that even a stickler like Fred will not complain too
much if people still use c[b] for convenience!
I will be updating my webpages as soon as I get the next NGS Journal out
of the way.
--
Julian
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
National Gerbil Society
http://www.gerbils.co.uk/
