My last thread got really confusing.
 

So. To clear a few things up.



The whole ordeal with my breeder and the diabetic gene goes back a long time. They didn't do a genetic test to find a diabetic marker. The whole thing is very complicated, but just to make it very generic. My dog had a disposition for diabetes.
Diabetes does skip generations in humans and dogs, but not all the time.
Just like a red hair gene, or a blue eye gene. For example, my boyfriend's parents and grandparents all have brown eyes, so this must mean that he has brown eyes, right? No, he has blue eyes, because one of his great grandparents had the gene for it, and it happened to show up in his generation. Just like diabetes, it might have happened ten or twenty generations ago, but if people with the gene keep breeding, it will eventually show back up, and doctors and vets can tell from previous history, if it goes back that far. Bringing me back to my point that the ordeal with my breeder goes back a long way.

Diabetes isn't completely genetic either. People get it with no family history. I never said it HAD to be genetic, it's just that your chances of having it are greater if you have a genetic history of it. My grandmother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes with no family history whatsoever.

So, for those of you that misunderstood, I know you think I'm an idiot, but it was just a very complicated situation, and I guess trying to make a general summary of it wasn't such a good idea.

I think you are referring to a recessive gene, some people say it skips a generation, but this may or may not be true, it depends, on several factors. Each animal gets two genes for each trait, one from each parent. Some genes are recessive and some are dominant. In order for a recessive gene to show up, each parent has had to give the offspring one recessive gene, in other words you need two recessive genes for it to show up. For example, you boyfriend's parents each had to give him a blue eye gene for the blue eyes to show up. Brown eyes only require one brown eye gene for it to show up because brown is dominate. So brown eyed people may have one brown-eyed gene, and one blue eye gene or two brown-eyed genes, but their eye appear brown. The darker color is always dominant. Even within the various shades of blue the darker blue is always dominant.

Don't worry about your thread getting off track, many of the more interesting threads do. I understood what you meant when you were talking about diabetes, and it's even more complicated because there are two different kinds of diabetes, and nobody thinks your an idiot, it's often hard to explain what we are talking about in a few sentences.

Good post Nancy! Sounds like you really understand genetics. I studied it some, and that's exactly what I learned! (the whole blue eye/brown eye thing)