admmad said:@megdavis Are you going to be working with diploids primarily or tetraploids primarily or both?
Maurice, you are an absolute treasure! I've been trying to wrap my head around pigment genetics, especially in tets, and your explanation here really helped me focus my thinking more explicitly. Thank you!
I'm working with both dips and tets, with the caveat that tet genetics has so confused me, I was going to focus a lot of the inbreeding program on the dips with only a few goals for specific traits (actually, mostly traits *other* than bloom pigment). I'll still do some inbreeding in the tets, but I've assumed this will be exploratory and to grow my own experience. Sure, I eventually want to figure out if it is even possible to get a daylily the exact Pantone color for the Raven's team purple, but my gut feeling is I'll need tets for that. Maybe I'll get lucky with my "fun" crosses, or maybe I'll knuckle down in five or ten years and work on this as a main focus, but for now, it's in the garden goal/side project category. Or maybe someone here has already done it and wants to sell me a daylily.
For diploids, I am developing a list of (Mendelian) expectations for each of my few chosen traits given classic inheritance patterns (dominant, recessive), and my plan was to compare observed to expected, and develop probabilities for the trait (I may or may not use a Bayesian approach...that's a teeny bit advanced for my statistical skills). I've been working under the hypothesis that I may, for some traits, be able to see partial penetrance using this approach. (Your note that objective measurement is needed to do this with pigment is well taken!! I'll have to consider how this might occur with the traits I want.) Once I have enough data, I hoped to be able to "predict" what range or distribution to expect from certain crosses, at least within my own lines, and then try combinations of goal traits. My ultimate goal was to use this knowledge to help me optimize later goals where I wanted a new trait PLUS the trait I'd evaluated. Hope springs eternal, right?
As a side note to those who are (sort of) following this, but who have never had genetics (and may want to explore why genetics, parentage and data analysis are all bouncing around the same thread together), I found this relatively straightforward site you might find useful:
https://www.nature.com/scitabl...
Once again, thanks Maurice!!
