Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!grce!jeff
From: jeff@grce.UUCP (Jeff Frank)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: was Mysterious exploding fish, now genetics program wanted
Message-ID: <188@grce.UUCP>
Date: 24 May 90 03:09:57 GMT
References: <1990May18.212647.19155@actrix.co.nz> <823@dbrmelb.dbrhi.oz>
Reply-To: jeff@grce.UUCP (Jeff Frank)
Organization: GENROCO, Inc., Slinger, WI
Lines: 30

In article <823@dbrmelb.dbrhi.oz> davidp@dbrmelb.dbrhi.oz (David Paterson) writes:
>> 
>> Suddenly, there was a loud bang and a flash of light!  She called
>> the police, and investigation showed the following:
>> 
Sorry to intrude.  I have a problem with Pnews and am to dumb to figure it
out.  I have watched this discussion for a couple of days and thought it had
gone far enough so you would not mind me splicing a request in.

I am involved with a closed email group which is currently discussing the 
salvation of wild populations of killifish.  We are all killikeepers and
want to know things like, "How many fish of a wild strain are needed to
begin a species maintenance effort to stack the deck in favor of keeping
phenotype, if not genotype, stable from F0 thru FX (where X= infinity)?"

One of our number has written a program in C to model hypothetical
species maintenance efforts.  I would like it to be a bit better at dealing
with traits which are not simply dominant/recessive.  When "values" for a
given gene exceed 2 the program gives what I feel are misleading results.
Basically the program has a random number generator which causes output
file to show "loss" of genes (alleles?) much sooner than I would expect.
It just settles on one value that after several generations, is shown to be
the only value left. 

Does anyone have a simple program written in C which might better deal with
this genetic problem?  An algorithim is probably sufficient.  It is hoped
we can spearhead a worldwide program to preserve these and other fauna, and
good models will help lay groundwork.

jeff