![]() “She is a bit of a mystery,” Lyons explains with the only way to know for certain being to give Venus a DNA test. ![]() So, if Venus isn’t a chimera, how exactly did she get the distinct coloring split on her face? Lyons says it could just be luck, the result of the black coloration being activated only in cells on one side of the face and the orange coloration being activated only on the other side of the face before the two patches merged in the middle. With her amazing black and orange face that’s offset with one green and one blue eye, Venus is quite simply stunning, but not everyone is convinced she’s a chimera cat.īecause female cats already have two X chromosomes, Leslie Lyons (opens in new tab), a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies the genetics of domestic cats, says that while Venus is incredibly rare, she could sport that coat without an embryo fusion taking place. With 2.2 million followers on Instagram (opens in new tab), 13-year-old Venus the two-faced cat has been a social media darling for years and is quite possibly the most famous feline on the planet. But, just in case you haven’t met them yet, here’s three chimera cats that have taken the world by storm. If you’ve been on social media this past decade and follow any cat-related accounts, it’s likely that you may have crossed paths with at least one of the famous felines below. Papaioannou believes that most cats that are mistaken for chimera cats are really just very striking examples of calico cats. A chimera would be a much more unusual and unlikely event.” In a mosaic, there’s only one individual and it just happens to have different genetic components active in its cells. If they fuse together early enough, they will become a single organism whose genetic input is from two completely different individuals. “A chimera … is a composite individual that was made up of cells from at least two different original embryos. While a lot of cats get passed off as being chimera, Columbia University Professor of Genetics and Development Virginia Papaioannou (opens in new tab) believes that in most cases, they’re unlikely to be. Geneticists believe chimera cats are rare But, occasionally, two embryos fuse together (like with the chimera cat) and if the kitten is born male this fusion creates an extra X chromosome that makes them chimera. The gene for a calico or tortoiseshell cat is only carried on the X chromosome and the Y chromosome doesn’t carry it, meaning calico and tortoiseshell cats are almost always female.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |