Many times, we feel that a single color can easily cause visual fatigue, especially some dark tones, which do not look very pleasing to the eye. This also leads to people paying more attention to it when choosing a cat. The same goes for the colors on cats. During the miraculous evolution of the cat species, many cats with different coat colors and spots have also been produced. While these cats have won people's attention, they have also attracted the attention of scientists. ​​​​​​

There is no doubt that tabby cats are popular. There used to be a tabby cat named Venus that attracted people’s attention on the Internet. Half of its face was black and the other half was orange. It looked like a tabby. cat. The eyes on the black side of the face are green, but the eyes on the orange side are blue. No one knows how it came to be, but many people think it is a chimera. Chimeras are formed from the fusion of two embryos in the womb, and such cats are actually very common. In fact, most Chimeras are male calico cats, with far fewer females.

For a long time, scientists have been studying how cats get their coat color, such as those that produce black and white spots, and now they have finally found a factor that determines the spots of cheetahs, the stripes of domestic cats and felines. Hidden genes. The gene is called Taqpep. The protein translated by this gene and two other genes is very important and will participate in a series of cell-level reactions, which will ultimately determine the unique pattern on your cat.

However, before this, scientists had gone through many detours. They once assumed that color was caused by the continuous expansion of pigment cells, but in fact, these were completely random effects. Scientists at the Universities of Bath and Edinburgh in the UK have been observing mice as they grow. They focused specifically on black-and-white piebald mouse embryos to see if there was a pattern that determined the mice's eventual pigmentation. In the paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers admit there is no pattern at all.

This result is unexpected to many people. Scientists have always thought that the color of piebald animals, especially mice, cats or horses, is determined in the womb. In developing skin, pigment is produced by specialized skin cells called melanocytes. Animals in the embryonic stage possess primitive melanin-producing cells called melanoblasts. They spread slowly as the skin grows. The scientists don't assume that every cat or mouse will develop a complete pattern, but they do expect to find something that guides the way melanocytes move.