Gene behind orange fur in cats
science.org
science.org
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.
The Cat genetics lab at UC Davis has been cracking the feline code for many years now.
(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.)
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.
Some color patterns in cats carry healthy problems. Breeding for white cats with blue eyes for example is discouraged, because they born deaf.
It may start in any BRICS country, and then expand! Tourist trips to cat cloning resorts. Check our CATLOG!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl
(Cheshires are a thing in that book, bio-engineered cats that can change fur colour like a chameleon/octopus/squid to exactly match their surroundings. They breed and devastate the world's population of small animals such that there's a bounty for every one killed. I'm trying to remember where I read a great critique of the book, especially the cheshires, but I'm not finding it)
Edited to add: found it: https://www.nyrsf.com/2015/10/eric-schaller-the-problem-with...
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.
> 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.
Ugh, you don't find this out by not looking at a lot of cute orange (and non-orange) cat embryos under a microscope. =(
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.
The gene has been shown to have a causation or at least an interesting correlation in orange cat probability. That’s enough for it to say behind which is not very specific, likely chosen deliberately for that property.
But the word "behind" also does imply causation rather than correlation, which is also wrong.
They already addressed it in the article, so I'm not sure what the purpose of this comment is.
Clarifying something in an article in a more clear way than the article did is fine, and especially when even the actual title itself is misleading as well.
Well that just can't be accurate.
Also, bonus points for nitpicking someone's use of the word nitpicking.
Not accurate? Try reading the thread that you randomly jumped into. lol.
That is very true. However, to myself (and presumably the other commenters) it didn’t look like that’s what you were doing. Though I’ll certainly give you the benefit of the doubt and trust that was your intention.
In the future, it might help if you also quote the specific part of the article that does the clarification, so it’s clear you’re aware of it and are providing additional context or better wording.
1) I WAS correcting the TITLE.
2) I DID read the article.
It was simply a suggestion. You can take it or leave it, it’s all the same to me.
And yet you keep repeating yourself.
I’d suggest perhaps closing Hacker News for the day but I get the feeling you’ll find some way to be insulted at that as well, so instead I’ll just wish you a better week than you’re having so far.
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.
While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all.
So statements like a gene being "switched on" are very much an abstraction: whereas switching on a data line in a chip puts a very nice neat little voltage potential somewhere, switching on a gene basically just means the concentration of some "chemical" (protein) starts increasing and getting mixed into the cell (or ejected out of it by interacting with a bunch of other floating around things).
Global variables, blegh. /s
Wouldn’t survive a code review.
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...
But in the future it might not be good enough for later more precise interventions; if you just start editing cats to make them orange now you're going to find out what the side effects are.
BTW, most times in software parlance "silo'd" means "not interconnected" rather than "interconnected".
And that's how I meant it. Software doesn't reuse execution bits as much as genes.
I don't fault them much, it's kind of hard to do an experiment here, but don't believe their results too hard.
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.She is pure, hate-filled joy.
Cats are full of love and murder; all in different amounts. Sounds like yours has lots of both <3
She came out of a storm drain as a very, very young kitten, so her wiring is probably all sorts of messed up.
My current cat is a calico and white and she's...emotional. =)
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.
However, less is said about them and there's less meme / awareness about female black cats being less common.
I suspect this is that an intact male orange cat is much more noticeably male than an intact male black cat.
Huh, I had not heard that. In my experience it's pretty evenly split -- at least, in my circle of friends and family there's eight black cats, four of each. (Most short-haired, one long-haired black cat that's female.)
Let's denote this as Xo and Xb for the genes. An orange female cat is XoXo, a tortoise shell / calico cat is XoXb and a black female cat is XbXb.
Male cats are either XbY or XoY - there are no tortoise shell male cats (there are cats with Klinefelter's syndrome that can be XbXoY but only mentioning this for a full coverage of the topic - and for a real example of this https://disneylandcats.com/cat-profile-francisco/ and it confuses things since XbXbY and XoXoY cats would be difficult to identify without a genetic test).
The thing with all of this is that the genetics for XoXo or XbXb and XoY or XbY are exactly the same percentages.
Doing the Punnett squares for cat coats and all the possible pairings and you get simplified
Genotype Count Percent of XX or XY
XoXo 3 25%
XoXb 6 50%
XbXb 3 25%
XoY 6 50%
XbY 6 50%
Francisco is the example I picked since he's likely the most well known of tortoiseshell (supposedly) male cats.
I suspect that some of the claims that he's female is based on a lack of knowledge of Klinefelter's syndrome.
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.
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.
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.
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....
Kitteh just doesn't care.