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Genetic Variation in Cheetah Fur Patterns and Color

•Non-mammals add stripes and spots as they grow to adulthood and mammals keep the same number and color of their patterns, but it stretches with their body

•"Somehow, cells in the black stripes know they are in a black stripe and remember that fact throughout the organism's life. We were curious about what's happening at the boundary between light and dark stripes and spots. How do these spots know to grow with an animal?"

•Kelly McGowan in the group studied fetal cat skin and found that tabby patterns only begin to arise when the hair begins to grow

•Only differences in the cells are the color of fur that they produce

•Lewis Hong, also in the group of researchers, used a technique called EDGE which can identify changes in gene expression levels between black and yellow areas of cheetah skin (obtained under anesthesia)

•Many of the differences he noticed were directly associated with a pathway influencing the expression of a gene called Edn3

•Very strong evidence supported that Edn3 and mRNA were produced at the base of the follicles, making the black hairs

"How the Sub-Saharan Cheetah Got Its Stripes: Californian Freal Cats Help Unlock Biological Secret"

ScienceDaily.com

September 20, 2012

In additon to Kaelin, Barsh, McGowan and Hong, Stanford researcher and technician Hermogenes Manuel also participated in the study.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NCI and the HudsonAlpha Institute

•"Studying color variation in cats provides the opportunity to uncover new principles of gene action and interaction that may have unexpected applications to understanding developmental and morphologic variation in natural populations, including humans." Menotti-Raymond at The Laboratory of Genomic Diversity

•All blotched tabbies had a mutations in each copy of the Taqpep, the gene associated with the blotched tabby markings, and 51 out of 51 mackerel tabbies had at least one unmutated version

•The king cheetah fur pattern is the result of a recessive genetic mutation in the Taqpep gene

•Most research was conducted using DNA samples from feral cats in Northern California captured for sterilization and release, tissue samples provided by City of Huntsville Animal Services group, and also on small skin biopsies and blood samples from captive and wild South Animal Services and Nambian cheetahs

•It was possible because of the recent discovery of the whole-genome sequence of the domestic cat

The researchers hypothesize that expression of Taqpep is required to establish a pattern of stripes or spots in early feline development that is then carried out by Edn3 as the hair grows. Furthermore, Taqpep mutations are surprisingly common in some non-striped domestic cat breeds as well, such as the Abyssinian and the Himalayan.

•First study to find a molecular basis of coat patterning in mammals

•The same biological mechanism that creates stripes in domestic tabbies and spots on cheetahs

•When the mutation in the mechanism occurs it results in dramatic changes in the coat patterns, such as the tabby's stripes turning into swirls, and the cheetah's spotted pattern to stripes

King Cheetahs

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