Posts Tagged ‘tigers’
What am I sappy cat blogging?
December 5, 2014
Iris, an Amur tiger, with her cub. From wordlesstech.
I saw this photo and got to wondering how many different kinds of tigers are there . . .
and some of their coloration is also interesting . . .
The stripeless white looks a lot like my Hobbes.
What am I sappy cat blogging?
May 31, 2013
These beautiful creatures are white tigers. As you can see from the black stripes, these tigers are not albinos. Researchers in in China’s Chimelong Safari Park sequenced the genome of white tigers and their normal colored relatives. They found a variation in just one gene, SLC45A2, that makes the difference, and makes white tigers white:
The SLC45A2 gene makes a protein of the same name, which consists of 560 amino acids. A single mutation in the gene—a change in just one DNA letter—switches one of those 560 amino acids from an alanine to a valine. This distorts the protein’s shape, and potentially prevents it from taking part in the creation of red-yellow melanin. Every white tiger has two copies of this mutated gene, and can only make the distorted protein. That’s all it takes to change their coats from orange to white.
Gunsmoke and Knitting 