The Taqpep gene establishes the pattern of a cat’s coat while a kitty is still in the womb, likely by determining the level of expression of another gene– Endothelin3 ( Edn3)–that drives the shade produced by a hair cell (lots of Edn3 results in darker hair). All the mackerel tabbies they studied had a normal version of a gene the researchers named Transmembrane Aminopeptidase Q ( Taqpep) while all the blotched tabbies had a mutated form of the gene.

“Until now, there’s been no obvious biological explanation for cheetah spots or the stripes on tigers, zebras or even the ordinary house cat.”īarsh and his colleagues examined DNA taken from feral kitties in Northern California that were captured, sterilized and released (a common practice employed to control the size of feral cat populations) and from tissue samples collected by the City of Huntsville Animal Services group. “We were motivated by a basic question: How do periodic patterns like stripes and spots in mammals arise?” study co-author Gregory Barsh, an investigator at HudsonAlpha and a Stanford geneticist, said in a press release. The study appears in today’s issue of Science. Now scientists from Stanford University and elsewhere have identified the gene that determines whether a tabby is mackerel or blotched and found that the same gene also can make a cheetah a king.

Those tabby markings come in two main varieties: proper vertical stripes of dark on a light background, known as the mackerel pattern, and a blotched variety consisting of less-organized, dark whorls. Tabby may be a colloquial term for a female kitty, but it’s more properly the name for the common stripey pattern on a domestic cat’s coat.

A genetic mutation determines whether a tabby cat is a mackerel (top row) or blotched (bottom row).

Mackerel tabby cat wild