could it be the darker color n the dna always wins over......

DarJones -- interesting, but please, just TELL US what the "answer" to the genetic riddle is.

I had to take genetics at Michigan State as part of my hort degree, in the next to last term of my senior year.

It was truly one of the WORST classes I ever took in terms of being complex and confusing. :-0

I was totally lost after Mendel. Somehow, I managed to pass with a 2.5 ONLY because there were other people in the class who were even more confused than I was, and the entire class of about 300 students was graded on a curve.

So, I'll NEVER know if you don't tell us. Thanks. :-)

Corn color is tricky because it's color can be influenced from 2 layers (out of 3) on the corn kernel.

The middle layer (can't remember the name) has a lot of influence on the outer layer (endocarp). The purple is a dominate trait over white, but there's another genetic influence on how the color carries...which I also forget the specifics of.

I guess that's not a lot of help, but it's a mish-mash of information for a half-assed start on an explanation. hehe...

Purple is indeed dominant over white, but in this case, I planted white corn and pollinated it with white corn.

You can partially explain this with epistasis which roughly means that two genes are interacting with unexpected results. That is a very broad brush stroke that does not quite explain this situation.

I suspect it is a result of Cherokee squaw having a biochemical pathway that produces the purple pigment but that it was turned off by a single gene in the white Cherokee Squaw seed I planted. The Silver King probably does not have the biochemical pathway for purple pigment but it does have the single gene that turns on the pathway. The result is that the crossbred seed are all 'turned on' for purple color.

I can't yet prove the above, it will take a lot more time and crossing to determine for sure what is happening. A couple of generations of segregation and self-pollination will resolve it.

DarJones

I was going to guess that the white kernels of the Cherokee squaw carried the purple gene (which it obviously had to) but the purple was repressed in some way. In your F1 seeds, the repression is gone somehow.

Is that pretty much equivalent to your thinking, Dar? What I don't know about genetics could fill volumes. :-)

I'd like to see more of us doing that sort of experiment. It doesn't take much in the way of resources.

Jim