In mammals the situation is more complex. It’s a little like following the directions in a paint-by-numbers kit and watching an image emerge as small areas of color become confluent. The work revealed a novel mechanism behind the origin of stripes, like Jackie’s in the photograph.Ĭolor is easier to study in fish, in which individual pigment cells denote a specific color, and the organization of the cells forms patterns.
#Tabby cats skin#
To trace the origins of the common striped coat pattern, the team analyzed gene expression in single skin cells from fetuses collected from feral cats in trap-neuter-release programs being spayed – half of such females are pregnant. However, the biology underlying mammalian color pattern has long been a mystery, one in which we have now gained new insight using domestic cats,” said Barsh, who is editor-in-chief of PLoS Genetics.
“The genes that control simple color variation, like albinism or melanism, are the same in all mammals for the most part. Their findings appear in Nature Communications. Now Christopher Kaelin, Kelly McGowan, and Gregory Barsh, from the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, have discovered how the tabby cat got its stripes: from a signal in the fetus. In 1902’s Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling famously explained how the leopard got his spots in what would today be deemed an extremely racist fable.
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