Kamila Součková 20. 4. 2025 clock 2 minutes video
It is quite easy to guess that the well -known animated character of the orange cat Garfield is a cat. You do not even have to pee through the tail, gender is clear by name. Interestingly, the vast majority of orange cats and those with annealed color are boys. How is it possible?
60 years of research
Scientists, in cooperation with cat lovers, have spent more than 60 years of unsuccessful search for a gene that is behind orange, and the multicolored hair. Only two teams independently have confirmed more than half a century long effort to discover the protein that affects this color. Cats are unique among animals, especially those with brindle color, which were created as a crossing of black and orange cats.
Truth about orange cats. How do they behave? Watch this YouTube video:
Source: YouTube
Chromosome x
Multicolor cats, with the brindle coloration, are always females, which, according to laboratory researchers, means that a gene variant causing either orange or black coat is found on chromosome X. If we explain it to Garfield, it means that his mother was orange, and according to her Garfield inherited his only chromosome X.
But cats inherit chromosome X from every parent. During embryonic development, each cell randomly chooses one x from which it expresses (medical expression for presenting, ed.) genes. The second chromosome is rolled into a kind of internal ball – this is called “x inactivation” (activity suppression). And what is the result of such events? The coat of cats with an annealed color is decorated with black spots separately from the orange, depending on which chromosome was suppressed in the given part of their skin.
Where the white spots take on the hair
And why do “brindle” cats have places with white color in the hair? This is something completely different from the process with the X Crhomozemm, which I explained above. White spots on the hair of these furry are decorated because they have a different, unrelated genetic mechanism that blocks pigment formation in some cells.
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