In the balanced lethal system in Triturus newts, individuals that inherit either the 1A or the 1B version of chromosome 1 twice will experience developmental arrest and die halfway embryonic development. Before that time, it has been impossible to predict which embryos are viable and which are doomed to die – until now. My PhD students Willem Meilink and Manon de Visser lead a paper, out in Ecology and Evolution, in which they use our genomic insights into the balanced lethal system (stay tuned!) to devise two distinct approaches to determine if an individual only possesses 1A (diseased), only possesses 1B (also diseased), or posses both 1A and 1B (healthy). This is very helpful in the balanced lethal system research program!

Reference: Meilink, W.R.M., de Visser, M.C., Theodoropoulos, A., Fahrbach, M., Wielstra, B. (2025). Determining zygosity with multiplex Kompetitive Allele-Specific PCR (mxKASP) genotyping. Ecology and Evolution 15(6): e71642.