http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/cat-pattern-genetics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=wiredscienceclickthru

From Cheetah Spots to Kitty’s Stripes: The Genetics of Cat Coats

After years of studying how cats get their color, researchers have pinpointed an elusive gene underlying spots on cheetahs, stripes in house cats and patterns across the feline world.

Called Taqpep, it and two other genes produce proteins central to a cascade of cell-level events that ultimately generate your kitty’s distinctive coat.

“It’s something we’ve been curious about for a long time,” said geneticist Stephen O’Brien of the National Cancer Institute. “We’ve known just three genes were involved, but nobody knew what the genes were.”

On the following pages, Wired talks to O’Brien about the findings, which were announced Sept. 20 in Science.

Feline coat patterns fall into two categories: stripes and spots. Though spots on a house cat may seem unusual to North American eyes, they’re more common in Europe, where breeders have historically had different preferences, said O’Brien.

Earlier work by O’Brien and colleagues had pinpointed two other genes, called Agouti and Mc1r, as producing proteins that respectively control whether a coat is banded or solid, light or dark. Add Taqpep, and patterns start getting complicated.

more on link:

>>more on link:

Yeah, lots of links…

>>How Turing Patterns Work

At the heart of any Turing pattern is a so-called reaction-diffusion system. It consists of an “activator,” a chemical that can make more of itself; an “inhibitor,” that slows production of the activator; and a mechanism for diffusing the chemicals.
Many combinations of chemicals can fit this system: What matters isn’t their individual identity, but how they interact, with concentrations oscillating between high and low and spreading across an area. These simple units then suffice to produce very complex patterns.

“In principle, the behaviour is generic. The trick is that you have to have the right rates for the chemical reactions, the right diffusion rates of reacting species,” said Irving Epstein, a Brandeis University chemist who studies pattern formation.<<

>>The reaction–diffusion system is one of the most studied nonlinear mechanisms that generate spatially periodic structures autonomous. On the basis of many mathematical studies using computer simulations, it is assumed that animal skin patterns are the most typical examples of the Turing pattern (stationary periodic pattern produced by the reaction–diffusion system). However, the mechanism underlying pattern formation remains unknown because the molecular or cellular basis of the phenomenon has yet to be identified.

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/21/8429.short<<

So this research points to this how this underlying mechanism works.

Veeeerrry interesting.