Why Orange Cats Exist

GARFIELD MIGHT BE THE MOST ICONIC orange tabby cat around, but he has so far refused to give up orange tabbies' most guarded beauty secret-how do they get their auburn coats? Hiroyuki Sasaki, a cat enthusiast and geneticist at Kyushu University in Japan, was determined to identify the elusive gene that carries the orange mutation in Felis silvestris catus (the domesticated cat).

- Elizabeth Rayne

He and his research team analyzed DNA in skin tissue from cats with and without orange fur and found a mutation to the ARHGAP36 gene. This was a type of deletion mutation, meaning that a segment of a gene is missing. In orange cats, the missing segment is located on an intron, or noncoding region, of the ARH-GAP36 gene.