Elizabeth PennisiWhen Rudyard Kipling told how the leopard got his spots, he missed the mark. Leopards have “rosettes”; spots are for cheetahs, says Gregory Barsh, a geneticist at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
But whatever you call the markings, how wild cats and their domestic counterparts acquire them has long been a mystery. Now, Barsh and his colleagues have found an answer.
In so doing, they have shown that a 70-year-old theory explaining patterns in nature holds true for fur color in cats, and likely other mammals as well.“This is an important paper unveiling part of the genetic basis [of ] coat color markings so prominent in many mammals,” says Denis Headon, a developmental biologist at the Roslin Institute.