Gene behind orange fur in cats

https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-behind-orange-fur-cats-found-last

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

221 131 2 years ago

xeonmc• 2 years ago

Tangentially related, but https://old.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/ is a subreddit dedicated to specifically orange-furred cats. I was expecting quite something else when I first read the subreddit name.

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

Do orange cats act/be dumber than the rest or is it Internet legend?

reducesuffering• 2 years ago

The stereotype is that orange cats are feistier. In my personal anecdotal experience it's true

waveBidder• 2 years ago

we have 2 orange kittens, and just this morning caught one of them trying to eat pebbles. there's always some weird new hijinks that they're up to.

saghm• 2 years ago

In my anecdotal experience, it's 100% true, but this also seems like it might be a bit of confirmation bias.

goodpoint• 2 years ago

It's an internet legend. There is zero difference in reality but people love anecdata.

willis9363• 2 years ago

Yes, but it's because 70% of orange cats are male and male cats tend to be more impulsive. It's a correlation rather than a causation.

https://youtu.be/wPVBGE6uUS4

hakube• 2 years ago

they're not dumb but they're a menace. They have some interesting quirks but the same could be said about black/tuxedo cats

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

The cat that owns our family is good-natured, affectionate, well-behaved, and dumb as a bag of hammers.

fiedzia2• 2 years ago

Internet legend. All cats do the same things. Some individuals are smarter, but I doubt it has anything to do with fur color. And I don't recall hearing anything special about orange cats from people who have many cats.

yabones• 2 years ago

It's largely folklore, but there is a kernel of truth to it. Orange cats have a pretty "silly" attitude, kind of like golden retriever dogs. Black/tux cats are usually docile and friendly. Female tortiseshell/tabby cats are lunatics. But there's also quite a bit of individual variation. I'd say it varies more from cat to cat than the "breed" would imply.

jzb2• 2 years ago

We have a very fluffy orange guy who is... not dumb, exactly, but I'd say he operates on a different plane than the rest of us. He often stares at things that aren't there -- or, at least, that none of us can see -- and he tends to puzzle things out more slowly and differently. For example, he didn't vocalize much at all as a kitten but has picked up sounds from other cats in the household. He didn't purr at all until very recently (he's six). He can jump like a champion, but hasn't figured out he can leap up to a spot with another cat's kibble. (Instead he sits and looks at it longingly while his sibling jumps up there and eats it if it's left unguarded...)

However, some of that might be explained by the fact that he was a very, very sickly kitten who almost didn't make it, and he seems to have a mild case of cerebellar hypoplasia.

dghughes• 2 years ago

My parents got a mature older orange cat who was baffled by doors. An open door was no issue but a half door open? Baffling! He sat and stared at the impossible to navigate two foot wide gap.

He loved BBQ it was obvious his previous owner did a lot of BBQing. My Dad dropped some raw hamburger for him.

Dad's Lay-Z-Boy chair wouldn't do down. What he didn't know was the cat was under it. The chair would slam down on his head but that was of no concern of the cat.

ordu• 2 years ago

The most dumb cat I had was the siamese cat. She was not orange. She learned how to steal from a pan closed by a lid only when she spent a summer in country with my old cat, who was a street born, and he was really smart. At some point he led me for a mile, insisting that I followed him. I followed because I was curios. It turned out my cat planned an assault on some house (not on humans but on an another male cat there) and wanted me to help.

But my siamese was extremely stupid. For example, it is the only cat that could be distracted. If you took a cat on your lap and it didn't feel like sitting on your lap, it would be hard to keep cat there, it would take any chance to run away. But my siamese would allow me to distract her and would forget that she wanted to run away. It could be distracted from food also. Her attention span was seconds, not like most of cats who get an idea and become obsessed with it.

She had broken spine near the tail. My theory is cats hide their real brain somewhere in the back of the spine, while the thing in their heads exists to mislead humans.

pilif• 2 years ago

Tangentially: interesting how we are looking for this for 60 years and then manage to have two separate teams come up with the answer independently and practically at the same time

bitwize• 2 years ago

It orange cat genes when it's orange-cat-gene time.

telgareith• 2 years ago

They got the braincell

atrus• 2 years ago

If it's affordable and practical for one person/team to do it, it's probably affordable for two or more groups to do it.

dj_mc_merlin• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

downboots• 2 years ago

inefficiency

benatkin2• 2 years ago

The rate of research could have sped up thanks to technological advancements.

FollowingTheDao6• 2 years ago

The reason this happened G Protein Coupled Receptors, which is what MC1R is, are being heavily investigated for drug development.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-024-01803-6

hinkley• 2 years ago

Well it makes sense since orange boys act like they’re on drugs.

quantadev14• 2 years ago

There's no such thing as a "gene for a trait". Just because some gene perfectly correlates with some trait doesn't mean that's all the gene does. There will be 1000s of things that gene does, and merely one of them just happens to be hair color.

superb_dev• 2 years ago

This is covered at the end the article:

No one previously knew Arhgap36 could affect skin or hair coloration—it is involved in many aspects of embryonic development, and major mutations that affect its function throughout the body would probably kill the animal, Barsh says. But because the deletion mutation appears to only affect Arhgap36 function in melanocytes, cats with the mutation are not only healthy, but also cute.

ourmandave• 2 years ago

it is involved in many aspects of embryonic development

Ugh, you don't find this out by not looking at a lot of cute orange (and non-orange) cat embryos under a microscope. =(

FollowingTheDao6• 2 years ago

That is just them making sht up.

Arhgap36 does not just effect the MC1R receptor. It is GTPase activator for the Rho-type GTPases. And there are a lot of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho_family_of_GTPases

These polymorphisms not diminish GTP totally, it just lowers it.

quantadev14• 2 years ago

It's more clear to just say "There's no such thing as a gene for a trait", especially since the title of the article says the opposite, and is wrong. That's why I corrected it.

polishdude20• 2 years ago

So is it more like there's some secondary "thing" that is for hair color and it looks at that gene to determine the color but there can also be another secondary "thing" such as hair length that also uses that same gene to determine that?

quantadev14• 2 years ago

A rough analogy is like if you flipped some bits in a computer program's executable code and then looked at what happens when you run that code, and notice a specific feature now no longer works for example. Yeah you found a way to break something, but you don't know what else you broke, or what the full effects were of flipping those bits.

hobofan• 2 years ago

it looks at that gene

I think it may help to not think of genes as lookup tables.

It's rather that genes act as blueprints for compound (protein/RNA) factories (which can also be potentially turned off/on). So the compounds that is produced may interact with the compound(s) that end up resulting in the hair color, and it may also interact with the compound that results in the hair length.

The problem is that any compound may in theory interact with any other compound, and there currently exists no way to 100% determine that they won't (for most compounds), which leaves open a huge space of possible chains of interactions.

In practice there are many interactions for every biological compound, which is the reason why medicine is so hard to develop and usually has a risk of side-effects.

FollowingTheDao6• 2 years ago

No.

ARHGAP36[1] stimulates GTP catabolism. And since MC1R is a g protein coupled receptor and uses GTP as an energy source, changes in the levels GTP will change the response of MC1R[2] to MSH and ACTH. It will react less strongly when there is lower GTP, and more strongly when there is higher GTP[3].

[1]https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q6ZRI8/entry [2] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q865E5/entry [3]https://www.nature.com/scitable/content/ne0000/ne0000/ne0000...

m00x• 2 years ago

Or it could do nothing, it could do a single thing, or it can do several things. Sometimes it just influences color, but often not.

They already addressed it in the article, so I'm not sure what the purpose of this comment is.

Sharlin3• 2 years ago

Trying to sound smart by nitpicking on article titles without actually reading the article is more or less the national sport of Hacker News.

astrange4• 2 years ago

Genetics solve causation issues by putting "correlation does not equal causation" at the start of their paper and then writing the rest of it as if it did equal causation.

I don't fault them much, it's kind of hard to do an experiment here, but don't believe their results too hard.

smackeyacky• 2 years ago

The fun thing is that they drift. So you might breed orange cats by selecting cats that are orange but over time the correlation to the genome might become weaker. It happens quite a bit in livestock genetics.

FollowingTheDao6• 2 years ago

But they are literally showing the mechanism, so the reason for causation is there.

amelius• 2 years ago

Yes. For example, in humans, being red haired correlates with fear of dentists.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2740987/

EasyMark2• 2 years ago

Could that also be that dentists are meaner to red haired people too? Subconsciously of course.

AceyMan• 2 years ago

Could it be because red hair people require additional anesthesia for equivalent effect, which perhaps they don't get at their dentist, resulting in more pain: Ergo, they're scared of visiting their dentist.

NoRagrets• 2 years ago

Somewhat related: https://vgl.ucdavis.edu/species/cat

The Cat genetics lab at UC Davis has been cracking the feline code for many years now.

astrange4• 2 years ago

What's the point of a genetics test for a coat pattern? Can't you just look at the cat?

(Same question about covid/flu tests - a lot of people act like taking a test is part of a treatment regimen, but it kinda isn't. But those are still useful since you might be an asymptomatic spreader.)

Etheryte• 2 years ago

The point is trying to understand how genetics works. Traits we can easily check for are easier to test against than say personality traits which are more subjective.

catlikesshrimp• 2 years ago

One of the most visible features of a cat: its hair. Imagine a startup for cloning your cat, except you can change some features. It can start with hair color. After some rounds it might add size, eye color, hair or no hair, chubbiness. You name it.

It may start in any BRICS country, and then expand! Tourist trips to cat cloning resorts. Check our CATLOG!

TeMPOraL• 2 years ago

What's the point of a genetics test for a coat pattern? Can't you just look at the cat?

When you're trying to understand a complex system, it's best to start with things you can actually see directly. Doubly so, if you're going to try and change something.

Coding analogy: there's a reason "Hello World" is about printing stuff to console, and the very first thing you do when writing to a new target, or reconfiguring some application, or testing unfamiliar commands, etc. is something where observable output directly reflects the changes to inputs you make. Otherwise, you don't know whether you're doing things right, or doing anything in the first place.

WRT. COVID/flu tests. You or your kid come to the doctor with a running nose and some cough. The test is useful to tell you whether you're dealing with one of the "heavy hitters" like the flu or COVID or RSV, or just a bog standard ${random kindergarten viral infection} that's treated by nose cleaning + anti-cough medicine + pretending you're not sick anymore, or whether this stuff is bacterial and maybe you need another swab to pick the right antibiotics.

pvaldes• 2 years ago

Sometimes in animals the same color can be result of several different genes working in different paths to achieve a similar result. This info is relevant for breeding purposes. Chicken color genetics is evil, for example but understanding it allowed to have self-sexing chicken. This saves millions of dollars to the farms.

Some color patterns in cats carry healthy problems. Breeding for white cats with blue eyes for example is discouraged, because they born deaf.

toast03• 2 years ago

Same question about covid/flu tests - a lot of people act like taking a test is part of a treatment regimen, but it kinda isn't.

First line treatment for covid/cold/flu is fluids, rest, and at least a bit of isolation.

But if you need more than that, it's useful to test for what you might have, as further treatments vary.

trebligdivad• 2 years ago

I loved reading about cat coat genetics; they seem to be 'right we've got it!' and someone then goes 'ok then what about this furball....'

Sharlin3• 2 years ago

cats with the mutation are not only healthy, but also cute.

The latter of which being the likely reason that the trait has become so widespread in the artificial selection environment of the domestic cat population.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 2 years ago

I understand your use of artificial in this context, However, it’s not like humans are en mass terminating the non-orange siblings, to the best of my knowledge.

Brybry• 2 years ago

But we do en masse sterilize cats, including feral cats.

hansonkd• 2 years ago

it’s not like humans are en mass terminating the non-orange siblings,

Black cats for instance are disproportionately more likely to be euthanized:

According to the National Library of Medicine, of all cats in shelters, black cats have the highest rate of euthanasia at a rate of 74.6%, and the lowest rate of adoption at 10% of any cat. [1]

Not to many breeders out there breeding black cats. Many people who feed feral cats want to feed the cute ones, so there is at least some bias towards propagating certain colors of cats.

(This is one of the reasons I picked the black cat at the shelter and one of the best decisions I ever made. Such a kind and loving cat)

[1] https://www.msj.edu/news/2024/02/the-power-of-black-cats.htm....

Sharlin3• 2 years ago

There's nothing about selection, natural or artificial, that implies killing. Orange cats spread around the world because the coat color was considered pretty and a novelty. I've read that ancient Egyptians already prized orange cats and likely intentionally bred more of them (which may or may not have involved culling).

zanderwohl• 2 years ago

The history of domestic cat coats is really fascinating. It wasn't until photography and cartoon artists like Louis Wain that breeding cats for coat color and pattern really took off. Then pedigree cat shows emerged and cats exploded in variety. We've only been aggressively selectively breeding cats for about 150 years, so there's a lot of potential still.

yapyap• 2 years ago

does this also make them stupid?

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

Kitteh is not stupid.

Kitteh just doesn't care.

waterpowder• 2 years ago

The (orange) cat has your pipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw

RobRivera• 2 years ago

This has opened my 3rd eye, engaged a critical reassessment of how I choose to engage in this world, and left me asking myself how I can leave my mark on this world commensurate to the truth the pipe strip has enlightened my world

runeks• 2 years ago

I didn't even know we were looking for that gene

dkarbayev• 2 years ago

Sounds like a solid candidate for Ig Nobel Prize award.

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

When you consider that most of human discovery eventually relates back to wanting to take care of cats, I'd say it's more Nobel worthy.

FollowingTheDao6• 2 years ago

Ha! Oh my, this is exactly what I am studying. MC1R is a G-Protein Coupled receptor (GOPCR) and the ARHGAP36 gene/enzyme is a GTPase activator for the Rho-type GTPases by converting them to an inactive GDP-bound state. Meaning it breaks down GTP (Guanosine Triphosphate is responsible for providing energy to the receptor.)

If there is too little or too much GTP it will effect the sensitivity of the MC1 Receptor and will change the color of the hair accordingly. BTW, humans have these same genes so the same will apply to humans.

I am studying these GPCRs and how they play a role in Mood and Chronic Illness like Long COVID and ME/CFS. Too little GTP and all of the 850+ G-Protein Coupled receptor will be effected. These include Serotonin, Dopamine, and Epinepherine Receptors.

You can see the whole list of them here: https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/GRAC/ReceptorFamiliesFor...

I has an enzyme deficiency (PNP) that makes me have way too much GTP and it has me disabled but getting better after this discovery I made about Receptor Energy.

I too much GTP also leads to grey hair.

Also, GLP1 is a GPCR!

This might have been the most serendipitous or God given thing for me to read today because I have been pretty suicidal and thinking I was wrong about my idea, but this literally is another piece I can put in my paper that proves that if the serotonin receptor does not have enough GTP, it does not matter how much serotonin you have, you will not get cellular activation via cAMP.

Adding here that cats had more Arghap36 RNA in orange regions. More Arghap36 means less GTP. Less GTP means less energy for the MC1R receptor which means less black/brown pigment is produced.

adinb2• 2 years ago

I volunteer as tribute! I’m a 2003 PwME who is second generation, and my son is diagnosed 3rd generation. And we have lateral transmission to my wife, somehow. My Dx. was by Dr. Nancy Klimas 2009 and had an extensive work up by the Mayo in 2010. Seriously, if there is anything I can do to assist your research, please let me know. (I’ll put contact in my profile)

FollowingTheDao6• 2 years ago

Yes! Please post your contact info!

fsckboy• 2 years ago

humans share the vast majority of our genes with other mammals; are a cat's genes for fur the same genes humans have for body hair? does this orange gene for cats bear any resemblance to ginger genes in humans?

aithrowawaycomm• 2 years ago

No, cats are a bit different from other mammals:

  In most mammals, including humans, red hair is caused by mutations in one cell surface protein, Mc1r, that determines whether skin cells called melanocytes produce a dark pigment or a lighter red-yellow pigment in skin or hair. Mutations that make Mc1r less active cause melanocytes to get “stuck” producing the light pigment.

  But the gene encoding Mc1r didn’t seem explain where cats’ orange fur came from. It isn’t located on the X chromosome in cats or any other species—and most orange cats don’t have Mc1r mutations. “It’s been a genetic mystery, a conundrum,” says Greg Barsh, a geneticist at Stanford University.

relistan• 2 years ago

If you read the article this is explained, including how both mechanisms work.

Gene behind orange fur in cats

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