Has anyone bred a serama rooster over easter egger bantam hens?

[FatChicksDigMe]

All chicken eggshells start out white. Doesn't matter what breed or where it is from, all start out white. They may be tinted blue if the oocyanin gene is present or they may be coated with porphyrin making them brown, but the egg shell itself always starts out white.

There is a gene that makes eggs bright white. I refer to it as the zinc white gene to differentiate from normal while or cream. Leghorns are notorious for their bright white eggs. This gene is also dominant, but can be covered up by brown pigments if the porphyrin biopath is turned on. Such eggs usually are very pale tan.

There is a gene on chromosome 1 for blue eggs as a result of a virus infection millenia ago. The blue gene is dominant. If one copy is present, the eggs will be blue tinted. There are two variants of this phenotype with the south American blue and the Asian blue. They are separated a very short distance on chormosome 1 and can't normally be combined except in heterozygous form.

There is an entire biopath (multiple genes) that produce porphyrin which coats eggs and makes them appear some shade of brown. Some of these genes are duration genes meaning they can be active longer or shorter time periods resulting in different shades of brown. Here is where it gets tricky. All chickens have the porphryin biopath. So how do we get white eggs? There are at least 3 different genes (probably more) that selectively disable porphyrin production which permits white or blue eggs to be produced.

The only other thing you need to know is that the blue egg pea comb linkage is very weak with roughly 1 in 36 birds hatched in a cross having blue egg combined with straight comb. You can easily locate birds that lay blue eggs and have straight comb.

To answer your basic question re blue egg bantams crossed to Serama, It would be trivial to breed a blue egg laying Serama. I've though very hard about crossing Silver Laced Seabrights with my blue egg laying Silver Lace Wyandottes to develop a blue egg laying Sebright.

I fell in love with genetics during undergrad, but it can definitely get intense! Thank you for sharing your wisdom! Alas, I sincerely didn't mean to sound daft by considering breeding a serama type bird with blue/green colored capabilities But honestly serama have quickly become very endearing to me when I got my 4 chicks a month ago. I've always loved EEs too for their resilience and beauty...I thought it would've been a cool experiment to say the least! Have a wonderful night my friend, and thank you for giving me a lot of amazing things to think about before bed lol