Line breeding question

What is the healthiest way to breed for a trait, and still maintain genetic health?

Lets say you had Mom and a few of the offspring to start with. Naturally, I'll try a different male with mom next time, but what about the offspring? I figure a son back to Mom would be a start, but how do you avoid sibling matings when starting a project like this?

I know eventually, other blood has to be introduced to keep things strong, and healthy, but when starting out, what do people do?

Your opinions are welcome.
Rick

Rick, this all depends on different factors.

If you had one animal that expressed this trait and no parents, I would breed the animal to a normal to try to figure out how the gene works or if it works at all. Of course if the offspring come out normal, raising one up to breed back to the original animal. As soon as you figure out how the gene works, outbreeding should be started to strengthen and create different lines.

If you had the parents, I would do the same as above, while breeding the parents back together to try for more of the same trait. Then take the offspring from the second breeding and breed them to other unrelated animals to create as much genetic diversity as possible. Once you figure out how it is crossed, I would also start thinking about combos.

I think my main point is, you have to line breed in order to produce a recessive trait or super form of an incomplete dominant trait, but a little patience lets you make enough different lines of hets to make this line breeding less damaging than sibling to sibling or parent to offspring breedings.

The parent to offspring cross only needs to be done once in order to determine the pattern of the mutation.

Chris

Thanks Chris. That's about how my mind is working it too. I have mom and dad, and will keep four offspring looks like.

I'm fairly certain Mom is the cause of the oddities. I was thinking, either the same DH back to her, and change her temps a bit to see if it hits again. Or I could go with My Coral male and see if it hits with him, and go from there.

Anyway, I got time. Just checking into things way ahead of time.

Thanks!