After years of studying how cats get their color, researchers have pinpointed an elusive gene underlying spots on cheetahs, stripes in house cats and patterns across the feline world.

Called Taqpep, it and two other genes produce proteins central to a cascade of cell-level events that ultimately generate your kitty's distinctive coat.

"It's something we've been curious about for a long time," said geneticist Stephen O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute. "We've known just three genes were involved, but nobody knew what the genes were."

On the following pages, Wired talks to O'Brien about the findings, which were announced Sept. 20 in Science.

Feline coat patterns fall into two categories: stripes and spots. Though spots on a house cat may seem unusual to North American eyes, they're more common in Europe, where breeders have historically had different preferences, said O'Brien.

Earlier work by O'Brien and colleagues had pinpointed two other genes, called Agouti and Mc1r, as producing proteins that respectively control whether a coat is banded or solid, light or dark. Add Taqpep, and patterns start getting complicated.

Images: Helmi Flick

Citation: Specifying and Sustaining Pigmentation Patterns in Domestic and Wild Cats. By Christopher B. Kaelin, Xiao Xu, Lewis Z. Hong, Victor A. David, Kelly A. McGowan, Anne Schmidt-Kntzel, Melody E. Roelke, Javier Pino, Joan Pontius, Gregory M. Cooper, Hermogenes Manuel, William F. Swanson, Laurie Marker, Cindy K. Harper, Ann van Dyk,0 Bisong Yue, James C. Mullikin, Wesley C. Warren, Eduardo Eizirik, Lidia Kos, Stephen J. OBrien, Gregory S. Barsh, Marilyn Menotti-Raymond. Science, Vol. 337 No. 6101, Sept. 19, 2012

More here:
From Cheetah Spots to Kitty's Stripes: The Genetics of Cat Coats

Comments are closed.