Okay, so now let's talk about nonepistatic genes, and these are going to be genes that, they're two genes, typically two or more genes, and, they affect the same phenotype, but they're not necessarily interacting. This is different from epistasis, which is the interaction of two genes. Now I'm presenting nonepistatic genes first because this is going to be the closest to what you're familiar with, and then we can base everything else, all the epistatic genes, in comparison to this. So let me back up here. First, epistasis, and generally when this happens, the presence of one gene allele will mask the phenotype of the second gene allele. So remember, we're talking about nonepistatic here, so nonepistatic, they won't mask it. Epistatic, they will. And so in non-epistatic situations, you're going to see the same ratio that you're used to seeing, the 9:3:3:1. In the epistatic, you're going to see an altered ratio. It’s going to be different, and different types of epistasis have different ratios, and we'll go through all of these individually. But for now, let's talk about this example. This is going to be focusing on corn snakes. Corn snakes come in four colors: orange, black, camouflage, and albino. Here's an example of a corn snake. Here, you can see that it has orange and black, so this would be a camouflage coloration. There are two genes that control this, O and B. Obviously, O is for orange, B is for black. Now, there are many different genotypes you can have, and you're going to see these charts a lot more coming up, so I want to explain it now. So here you can see that you have a dominant here and a line here. So what does the line mean? The line means it can either be dominant or recessive. So here we have homozygous or heterozygous dominant for O and homozygous recessive for B. So in this genotype, you're going to get orange. In the opposite, meaning that this is homozygous recessive for O and homo or heterozygous dominant for B, you're going to get black. Now if you have a dominant allele for both O and B, you're going to get the camouflage, which is what this looks like where you can see both O and B, or the orange and the black, and if you're recessive for both, you're going to get albino.
So, we know this about this thing. I'm giving this to you. So we do a question like this. It says, What is the offspring's genotype and phenotype derived from the mating of two heterozygous camouflage corn snakes? So, heterozygous camouflage is going to be heterozygous for both O and B, and because it's a mating, there are two of them. So, you can do a Punnett square if you prefer, but I think that the branch method is going to be faster. You want to do a Punnett square, feel free to pause it right now. Write out your Punnett square, or even pause it if you're going to do the branch method. See if you can figure out what the genotypes are, and the ratios for each, and then, come back and I'll do the explanation. So hopefully, you have paused it and now you're restarting it, and you're looking at the, to check your answer. So, we're going to walk through. So, we're doing this heterozygous mating with, orange and black. It's camouflaged here. If we're going to start with this, our first is orange or not orange. So, how do we do this? We do a basic Punnett Square. So, 3/4 will be orange, and 1/4 will be not orange, because the two recessive o's here can be a bunch of different colors. It can be albino, it can be black, but just for right now, we're saying not orange. Then, for each, we want to do the same for black. Now, I can write out the Punnett square, but it's going to look like this,916×916. 316×116. So, what are the offspring's genotype and phenotype? Well, 916 will be camouflage, which means heterozygous for both. 316 will be orange. 316 will be black, and 116 will be albino. And so when we see this 9:3:3:1 ratio in a situation in which, you know, two genes are working together to interact with the same phenotype, this is going to be a nonepistatic situation. So, this is the normal ratio that you're used to seeing, so this is the nonepistatic situation. So now, let's move on and get to epistatic situations.