The cats have unique coat stripes and have long been a mystery.
Nationalgeographic.co.id—Cats with stripes are something very interesting, they are cute and adorable with their own patterns and patterns. But have you ever wondered, how does your favorite furry cat get its stripes?
A new study of domestic cats has revealed which genes give cats their distinctive coat patterns and hinted that the same genetics could give wild cats, such as tigers and cheetahs their signature coats.
“How cats get their stripes is a decades-old mystery in the life sciences,” senior author Gregory Barsh, a geneticist at the HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama told Live Science.
About 70 years ago, scientists began developing theories about why and how organisms have periodic patterns, like the stripes on a zebra or the rigid body parts of a caterpillar.
In some animals, such as zebrafish, this pattern arises because of the arrangement of different types of cells.
“But in mammals, skin and hair cells are exactly the same all over the body, and the color pattern arises because of differences in genetic activity between, say, cells under the dark band and cells under the light band,” said Barsh.
So the question of how cats got their stripes boils down to how and when various genes are active in their cells and how those genes affect the animal’s development. In short, it’s complicated.
But now, in a new study, published in the journal Nature CommunicationsBarsh and colleagues identified several genes that work together to give cats coat patterns.
Big cats also have the same genetics so they have a distinctive stripe pattern.
One gene, called Transmembrane aminopeptidase Q (Taqpep), they had previously identified, in a study published in the journal Science.
Cats carrying one version of the Taqpep gene end up with narrow, dark stripes, whereas cats with a mutant version of the gene have a “big circle” of dark fur, the version of the gene most common in wild cats.
To investigate what additional genes might shape the various markings on cats’ fur, the team began collecting tissues discarded from clinics that sterilize feral cats. Some of the resected cat uteri contained non-viable embryos, which the researchers examined in the laboratory.
