The research of some geneticists fills a hole in our knowledge about felines.
There are countless popular legends, not only in Italy, about how animals have acquired the patterns that characterize their hair: for example, the polka dots of the cheetah and the leopard or the stripes of the zebra and the tiger. We are talking about fascinating but unscientific explanations, which tell us more about the culture of the place where they were born and nothing about how things really are.
In the cauldron of popular legends there are also cats, which, in some specimens, have a striped pattern on their body. Leaving aside the stories that are told to children, let us now try to answer the question of how cats acquire this particular coloration.
Why and how the hair layer of felines is born
According to a team of geneticists, who published the results of a study in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the responsible for the characteristic striped pattern of cats is a particular gene, which scientists believe they have isolated for the first time. This is research that actually fills a hole regarding our knowledge of cats.
The way cat “patterns” are passed down is in fact clear to researchers, to the point that it is possible, by mating certain “types” of these animals, to get for this or that pattern on the fur. How the patterns emerge in a growing embryo, however, is still an unsolved mystery, which Dr. Gregory S. Barsh, author of the new report, tried to shed light on.
Why it’s important to understand the secrets of cat “motifs”
“We think this is really a first step in understanding what the molecules” involved in the process might be, Barsh said. “We’ve been able to advance our understanding concerning one of the most important questions in developmental biology: how do patterns form?”
The world of animals actually never ceases to amaze scholars. In fact, only when it comes to the possibilities of survival, researchers have observed the existence of an immortal jellyfish, which would be the longest-lived animal on the face of the Earth. At other times, the characteristics of animals, which share with us the fate of the planet, highlight some worrying underlying problems: this is the case of animals that are shrinking because of rising temperatures.
Giuseppe Giordano