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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
(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)
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You’re arguing semantics. It doesn’t make it more clear.
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.
What was wrong was the singular form of the word "gene". That means "The Gene", and that's wrong. Richard Dawkins talks about this in his Selfish Gene book. People often say "the gene for this" or "the gene for that" and it's not how things work.
But the word "behind" also does imply causation rather than correlation, which is also wrong.
Actually 'nitpicking' is when you assume someone didn't read an article whenever their post references the title of the article.
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.
> 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.
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.
Like I said, I understand and believe you. But clearly that’s not what most commenters understood so I proposed how you could’ve made that clearer and not have to keep clarifying and getting downvoted.
It was simply a suggestion. You can take it or leave it, it’s all the same to me.
Holy moly, you’re one unreasonably angry individual. You do realise you’re lashing out at someone who said repeatedly they believed you and was polite about it, right?
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.
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.
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?
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.
It's also worth remembering that a cell isn't a well structured environment - it's essentially a bag of chemicals, with some slightly smaller bags of other chemicals inside it.
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).
> 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.
Any closer look into biology completely dispels the notion of intelligent design. It’s over complicated, fragile, poorly architected and works, essentially, by side effects of all chemical reactions happening inside those bags of goo.
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.
Also, the results with the current methods could be fine for imprecise purposes. Say, if you had some cat embryos and wanted to know which one was orange for your designer kitten.
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.
I think with modern computer systems the effects would be relatively silo'd. I have the sense that each gene are more multi-use and interconnected than execution memory.
The more complex a system is the more reuse of code there generally is. (i.e. multiple different functions making use of some shared function) That means if you randomly alter something, it's more likely to have multiple effects rather than a single effect.
BTW, most times in software parlance "silo'd" means "not interconnected" rather than "interconnected".
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].
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.
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.
Yeah, not even DNA is fully in control. Michael Levin's planarian worms experiments show that he can use an electromagnetic field for a short time in a certain way, and create a two-headed worm (normally it's one of course) that will persist to all it's offspring even though there's been ZERO alterations to DNA. So there is still much about the emergent complexity that we do not know.
Even weirder conceptually than that: you have the same dna in all your cells. So why is your brain your brain, your eyes your eyes, and so on? Then you learn that not all genes are expressed all the time. Then you learn even among those expressed genes that they could have been spliced differently and resulted in completely different protein structures. No magnets needed for this example of phenotypes extending beyond mere dna sequence, just a mirror to look at yourself.
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
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
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.
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.
Can confirm female tortiseshell cats are, yes- lunatic is the best way to describe their personality. My family had several and they were all a combination of smart and crazy, mostly the latter. As a teenager I found it amusing to teach one of them to ride on my shoulder like a pirate's parrot. An unintended consequence is that she would also do that to house guests, who weren't expecting it, making a five foot vertical leap from ground level from behind to perch on their shoulder.
This describes my black cat exactly; she runs and hides at the door bell, but when it all calms down, she inevitably comes out to see who it is and within half hour is trying to climb in their lap and is begging for attention from the new person. I had an orange cat once and he pretty much thought he was the family dog. I’ve never seen a friendlier cat, didn’t matter if it was another cat, a dog, a person, or a squirrel; anyone who would play he was ready to go.
We have an almost pure-black void that screams bloody murder at everything--pick her up, screaming; walk in the room, screaming; give her food, screaming--but cuddles more aggressively than any cat I've ever heard of and purrs nonstop (when she isn't screaming). She hisses as a primary communications mechanism. I hear that cat hiss more in a day than every hiss from every other cat I've ever had combined. She also panic poops when the other cat gets within 5 feet.
More anecdata; my orange boy also thought he was the family dog. He was rather dumb as a rock, but sweet as pie. Loved every human or animal he ever met.
My current cat is a calico and white and she's...emotional. =)
My next door neighbour was a ginger crossed with a persian. Let's just say there was a LOT of orange. The cat was very friendly to humans, and an absolute terror to foxes and any cat they didn't consider a neighbour.
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.
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.)
Cat coat color is an X linked gene, so there's no representation of it on the Y chromosome.
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%
It ends up with 2/3 of the orange cats being male and 2/3 of the black cats being male. This doesn't quite match real world situations since you could have a colony that is dominated by orange cats (or black cats ... or neither).
Also noting that you can occassionally get a "tortiose shell" esque male cat via a pretty rare process known as chimerism. i.e. two or more different embryos merge in the womb resulting in different parts of the body being formed from different embryos (meaning different DNA depending what part of the body you sample from). And of course for this to result in a cat you can see, they have to get lucky enough that the combination of embryos still produces a viable fetus.
Not to take anything away from the info you've provided since it is all interesting. But it seems francisco's gender is pretty debated. There are a few that talk about them being a female with certainty, but without any reasoning I also take their info with a grain of salt.
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.
My kitten had iron-deficiency when he was doing that. Maybe worth a quick check/ask and with a little bit of dietary change or a supplement the problem could be addressed.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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)
What the hell, my favorite cats are the black ones. Even my cat is black and I chose her from her litter specifically because of her color. Is this all because of stupid superstition?
Most reasonable explanation I've heard is that black cats typically don't look good on pictures. Or maybe they are just overlooked by people visiting animal shelters?
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).
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.
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....'
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.)
> 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.
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.
A $60 customer genetics test doesn't seem like it's for educational purposes.
https://vgl.ucdavis.edu/test/charcoal-pattern-bengals
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.
> 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.
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!
That's how we get Cheshire cats...
Is that a Windup Girl reference?
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...
Yes!
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.
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)
Yes! Please post your contact info!
It’s there, scrappy at duck dot com, I’ll delete this in a few
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?
No, cats are a bit different from other mammals:
If you read the article this is explained, including how both mechanisms work.
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.
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.
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.
You’re arguing semantics. It doesn’t make it more clear.
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.
What was wrong was the singular form of the word "gene". That means "The Gene", and that's wrong. Richard Dawkins talks about this in his Selfish Gene book. People often say "the gene for this" or "the gene for that" and it's not how things work.
But the word "behind" also does imply causation rather than correlation, which is also wrong.
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. =(
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.
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.
Trying to sound smart by nitpicking on article titles without actually reading the article is more or less the national sport of Hacker News.
Actually 'nitpicking' is when you assume someone didn't read an article whenever their post references the title of the article.
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.
> Actually 'nitpicking' is when you assume someone didn't read an article whenever their post references the title of the article.
Well that just can't be accurate.
Also, bonus points for nitpicking someone's use of the word nitpicking.
> without actually reading the article
Not accurate? Try reading the thread that you randomly jumped into. lol.
I was (jokingly) commenting on your curious definition of the word nitpick, but yeah, guess I should have read the article. Thank you for your advice.
Wasn't advice. Just correcting your intentionally false statement.
> 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.
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.
No, because both of these things are true at the same time:
1) I WAS correcting the TITLE.
2) I DID read the article.
Like I said, I understand and believe you. But clearly that’s not what most commenters understood so I proposed how you could’ve made that clearer and not have to keep clarifying and getting downvoted.
It was simply a suggestion. You can take it or leave it, it’s all the same to me.
> it’s all the same to me
And yet you keep repeating yourself.
Holy moly, you’re one unreasonably angry individual. You do realise you’re lashing out at someone who said repeatedly they believed you and was polite about it, right?
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.
Not insulted by the condescending tone at all. I assumed you were being sarcastic/funny.
Yes. For example, in humans, being red haired correlates with fear of dentists.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2740987/
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.
Could that also be that dentists are meaner to red haired people too? Subconsciously of course.
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?
> 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.
It's also worth remembering that a cell isn't a well structured environment - it's essentially a bag of chemicals, with some slightly smaller bags of other chemicals inside it.
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).
> 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.
Global variables, blegh. /s
Any closer look into biology completely dispels the notion of intelligent design. It’s over complicated, fragile, poorly architected and works, essentially, by side effects of all chemical reactions happening inside those bags of goo.
Wouldn’t survive a code review.
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.
Also, the results with the current methods could be fine for imprecise purposes. Say, if you had some cat embryos and wanted to know which one was orange for your designer kitten.
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.
I think with modern computer systems the effects would be relatively silo'd. I have the sense that each gene are more multi-use and interconnected than execution memory.
The more complex a system is the more reuse of code there generally is. (i.e. multiple different functions making use of some shared function) That means if you randomly alter something, it's more likely to have multiple effects rather than a single effect.
BTW, most times in software parlance "silo'd" means "not interconnected" rather than "interconnected".
>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.
The beauty of my "bit flip" analogy is that it holds true even without assuming there's any code reuse.
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...
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.
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.
Yeah, not even DNA is fully in control. Michael Levin's planarian worms experiments show that he can use an electromagnetic field for a short time in a certain way, and create a two-headed worm (normally it's one of course) that will persist to all it's offspring even though there's been ZERO alterations to DNA. So there is still much about the emergent complexity that we do not know.
Even weirder conceptually than that: you have the same dna in all your cells. So why is your brain your brain, your eyes your eyes, and so on? Then you learn that not all genes are expressed all the time. Then you learn even among those expressed genes that they could have been spliced differently and resulted in completely different protein structures. No magnets needed for this example of phenotypes extending beyond mere dna sequence, just a mirror to look at yourself.
That was correct and made sense until the magnets and mirrors stuff which would require a bit of mental telepathy to understand what you meant.
But they are literally showing the mechanism, so the reason for causation is there.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
inefficiency
Collaboration comes with it's own challenges and inefficiencies
modern science isn't intended to minimize inefficiency- it's intended to maximize the rate of stochastic discovery.
Independent concurrent discovery might be better than independent confirmation.
survivorship bias
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.
The rate of research could have sped up thanks to technological advancements.
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
Well it makes sense since orange boys act like they’re on drugs.
It orange cat genes when it's orange-cat-gene time.
They got the braincell
The (orange) cat has your pipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw
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
Sounds like a solid candidate for Ig Nobel Prize award.
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.
I didn't even know we were looking for that gene
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.
Do orange cats act/be dumber than the rest or is it Internet legend?
The cat that owns our family is good-natured, affectionate, well-behaved, and dumb as a bag of hammers.
This is my favorite HN comment of all time
Mine is wicked, self centered, and doesn't give 2 hoots about anybody except his food.
Probably smart as hell. I have a friend, with a little black cat that has him completely wrapped around her paw.
The perfect combination of charm and simplicity
Lmao. I don't often laugh on hn like this.
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.
Can confirm female tortiseshell cats are, yes- lunatic is the best way to describe their personality. My family had several and they were all a combination of smart and crazy, mostly the latter. As a teenager I found it amusing to teach one of them to ride on my shoulder like a pirate's parrot. An unintended consequence is that she would also do that to house guests, who weren't expecting it, making a five foot vertical leap from ground level from behind to perch on their shoulder.
This describes my black cat exactly; she runs and hides at the door bell, but when it all calms down, she inevitably comes out to see who it is and within half hour is trying to climb in their lap and is begging for attention from the new person. I had an orange cat once and he pretty much thought he was the family dog. I’ve never seen a friendlier cat, didn’t matter if it was another cat, a dog, a person, or a squirrel; anyone who would play he was ready to go.
We have an almost pure-black void that screams bloody murder at everything--pick her up, screaming; walk in the room, screaming; give her food, screaming--but cuddles more aggressively than any cat I've ever heard of and purrs nonstop (when she isn't screaming). She hisses as a primary communications mechanism. I hear that cat hiss more in a day than every hiss from every other cat I've ever had combined. She also panic poops when the other cat gets within 5 feet.
She is pure, hate-filled joy.
> 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
Yep, and she's simultaneously magical and awful. Just a perfect cat.
She came out of a storm drain as a very, very young kitten, so her wiring is probably all sorts of messed up.
More anecdata; my orange boy also thought he was the family dog. He was rather dumb as a rock, but sweet as pie. Loved every human or animal he ever met.
My current cat is a calico and white and she's...emotional. =)
My next door neighbour was a ginger crossed with a persian. Let's just say there was a LOT of orange. The cat was very friendly to humans, and an absolute terror to foxes and any cat they didn't consider a neighbour.
We used to have two Burmese cats and although they were from the same litter they had completely different personalities.
What is this based on?
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.
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
Genetics says that this is also true for black cats (that most black cats are male).
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.
most black cats are male
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.)
Cat coat color is an X linked gene, so there's no representation of it on the Y chromosome.
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
It ends up with 2/3 of the orange cats being male and 2/3 of the black cats being male. This doesn't quite match real world situations since you could have a colony that is dominated by orange cats (or black cats ... or neither).Also noting that you can occassionally get a "tortiose shell" esque male cat via a pretty rare process known as chimerism. i.e. two or more different embryos merge in the womb resulting in different parts of the body being formed from different embryos (meaning different DNA depending what part of the body you sample from). And of course for this to result in a cat you can see, they have to get lucky enough that the combination of embryos still produces a viable fetus.
Messybeast ( http://messybeast.com and more specifically http://messybeast.com/catarchive.htm and http://messybeast.com/genetics-index.htm ... and much much more) is the site I've found for cat coat genetics.
http://messybeast.com/mosaicism6.htm
Not to take anything away from the info you've provided since it is all interesting. But it seems francisco's gender is pretty debated. There are a few that talk about them being a female with certainty, but without any reasoning I also take their info with a grain of salt.
Here are some other examples - http://messybeast.com/mosaicism3.htm
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 that doesn't necessarily mean they are less intelligent
Stupid is as stupid does
In my anecdotal experience, it's 100% true, but this also seems like it might be a bit of confirmation bias.
When I was a child I had a very intelligent (female) orange tabby.
Reading was instead of had was very confusing to me
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.
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.
My kitten had iron-deficiency when he was doing that. Maybe worth a quick check/ask and with a little bit of dietary change or a supplement the problem could be addressed.
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.
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.
The stereotype is that orange cats are feistier. In my personal anecdotal experience it's true
I thought that was about people, and it turned out there was actually some gene that affects both personality and hair colour.
It's an internet legend. There is zero difference in reality but people love anecdata.
source?
I think the burden of proof is on the "orange cats have statistically-significant behavioural specificity" side
I mean, they are orange.
they're not dumb but they're a menace. They have some interesting quirks but the same could be said about black/tuxedo cats
[flagged]
I really like that subreddit. Usually lights up my day...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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....
What the hell, my favorite cats are the black ones. Even my cat is black and I chose her from her litter specifically because of her color. Is this all because of stupid superstition?
Most reasonable explanation I've heard is that black cats typically don't look good on pictures. Or maybe they are just overlooked by people visiting animal shelters?
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).
But we do en masse sterilize cats, including feral cats.
does this also make them stupid?
Kitteh is not stupid.
Kitteh just doesn't care.