08/28/2020
Here's a grow out I haven't talked much about. Mox is a young Diffused Diamond (Lava Charcoal) from Rockdoc Reptiles, something I've been eager to get ahold of for several years now. He's a bit on the small end, but is energetic and growing. Because of his price tag and the cost of importing, along with a shared interest in the project, he is a three-way investment between myself and two other breeders. Diamond corns appear to be extremely challenging to produce. It's hypothesized that Charcoal and Lava may reside very close together on a shared chromosome, thus experiencing genetic linkage...that is, the existing Lava and Charcoal alleles on each chromosome tend to stick together. This means the mutant allele on the Lava locus tends to stay paired with a wild-type allele on the Charcoal locus, thus never allowing any offspring to be homozygous for both without separating the two alleles via recombination. Judging by the number of attempts that have resulted in visual Diamonds, I'm guessing that recombination frequency is quite low. The good news is, if genetic linkage is the reason Diamonds are hard to produce, it means once you have one it becomes *very* easy to make more.
