Who gets the family silver?

For people, inheriting the family silver can be a mixed blessing, depending on your feelings regarding elderly cutlery or dinnerware. Horses have it easier: they don't have any cutlery at all, and inheriting the family silver often means they have unusual  - and absolutely stunning - coat colours.

Yes, this horse is real. Can I have one please?? This silver dapple horse is SC Code Of Honor, a Rocky Mountain Horse stallion (pic linked through from here).

Other uses for champagne

I expect that most of you know that only sparkling wines produced in the Champagne region of France are technically allowed to be labelled as champagne. Here in Australia, locally produced wines in this style are called sparkling wines instead.  Once, at the Forest Lodge Hotel, the menu described them as sparkly. I think this is a wonderful mental image, although it did make me worry about swallowing glitter.

Mmm, these guys take their sparkly seriously... (Photo linked through from here).

As it turns out, the term champagne has at least one other use - it's a version of the SLC36A1 (solute carrier family 36, member 1) gene that interacts with the basic coat colour genes to product unusual and, most of the time, beautiful coat colours.

For the scientists - assembling an OpenPCR machine

One of the reasons I love laboratory work is the toys (you know, all the things a supplier would describe as specialised equipment) that we get to use. Amongst many pieces of equipment that glide, orbit, beep or just hum, the laboratory at Practical Horse Genetics has an OpenPCR machine.

Why do OpenPCR machines kick arse? You get to assemble them! For me, there is no better way to get an understanding of what features a PCR machine should or could have. And, should things ever go wrong, I won't be completely in the dark as to what part may be broken or misbehaving.

The OpenPCR shipping box is like a present, but with more presents inside!

Golden horses: just add cream

Palomino and buckskin are probably my two favourite coat colours. They can be absolutely stunning! I used to have a few a few copies of various Quarter Horse magazines from the USA that I would go over again and again, admiring various gleaming gold stallions and their contrasting cream or black manes and tails, until the magazines fell apart from too much love.

An outrageously good-looking palomino Thoroughbred foal from Winning Colours Farm here in Australia.

Luckily for me, these two colours are genetically related.

The grey coat colour in horses

I once owned a flea-bitten grey pony with the delightfully misleading name of 'Diablo'. The rumour about this sweet, chubby gelding was that he was half Welsh Mountain Pony, half Standardbred, the product of an unsanctioned dalliance at a local agricultural show. This was completely plausible, since like most ponies he could get fat on the hint of a whiff of a single straw of hay, but wow could he trot; he regularly gave horses with at least two hands on him a fright as he floated gracefully past in our Pony Club trotting races.

This Welsh Mountain Pony has a lot in common with Diablo... grey: tick! Bulges that may not exactly be muscle: tick! Very enthusiastic trot: tick! Now just imagine that he's four hands taller, with a good dusting of dark freckles through his coat. Pic linked from here.

Chestnut, black, and bay or brown coat colours

I've had quite a few horses in my life, but none had glamorous or flashy colours like a palomino, overo or silver dapple. No, it's been bay, brown, chestnut and grey for me, and flea-bitten grey at that.

The kind of beautiful palomino colouring that a little girl dreams about... (pic linked from Keystone Center)

It's not that I didn't love the idea of having a horse with a beautiful and unusual coat colour, that's just the way it panned out. Well, probably that and the fact that unusual coat colours are, by definition, less common.