genetic mutation

2 Articles

Feline Genetics And Why Orange Cats Are The Most Special

June 9, 2025 by 43 Comments

Recently, butlers to orange-colored cats got a bit of a shock when reading the news, as headlines began to call out their fuzzy feline friends as ‘freaks of nature’ and using similarly uncouth terms. Despite the name-calling, the actual reason for this flurry of feline fascination was more benign — with two teams of scientists independently figuring out the reason why some cats have fur that is orange. Tracking down the reason for this turned out to be far more complicated than assumed, with the fact that about 80% of orange cats are male being only the tip of the cat-shaped iceberg.

It was known to be an X chromosome-linked mutation, but rather than the fur coloring being affected directly, instead the mechanism was deduced to be a suppression of the black-brownish pigmentation (eumelanin) in favor of the orange coloration (pheomelanin). Finding the exact locus of the responsible ‘O gene’ (for orange) in the cat genome has been the challenge for years, which turned out to be a mutation related to the X-linked ARHGAP36 gene, whose altered expression results in the suppression of many melanogenesis genes.

Interestingly, this particular mutation appears to be of a singular origin that apparently persisted over millennia courtesy of the domestication of humans (H. sapiens) by Felis catus.

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High Energy Gardening Means Nuking Plants

February 3, 2016 by 45 Comments

We live in a world transformed by our ability to manipulate the nucleus of atoms. Nuclear power plants provide abundant energy without polluting the air, yet on the other hand thousands of nuclear warheads sit in multiple countries ready to annihilate everything, even if it’s not on purpose. There are an uncountable number of other ways that humanity’s dive into nuclear chemistry has impacted the lives of people across the world, from medical imaging equipment to smoke detectors and even, surprisingly, to some of the food that we eat.

After World War 2, there was a push to find peaceful uses for atomic energy. After all, dropping two nuclear weapons on a civilian population isn’t great PR and there’s still a debate on whether or not their use was justified. Either way, however, the search was on to find other uses for atomic energy besides bombs. While most scientists turned their attention to creating a viable nuclear power station (the first of which would only come online in 1954, almost ten years after the end of World War 2), a few scientists turned their attention to something much less obvious: plants.

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