An international team of scientists sequenced the genome of Lil Bub to unlock the secrets of her mystique
An international team of scientists sequenced the genome of Lil Bub, one of the world's most famous cats, to unlock the secrets of her mystique. By Karin Brulliard Karin Brulliard Reporter and editor for Animalia Email Bio Follow March 4 at 12:21 PM Dario Lupianez is the author of dense scientific papers with titles including “Breaking TADs: How alterations of chromatin domains result in disease.
In some respects, Lupianez and his partners in this project, fellow Berlin resident Daniel Ibrahim and University of Pennsylvania’s Orsolya Symmons, now know Lil Bub more intimately than pretty much anyone. They spent four years crowdfunding money to sequence the cat’s genome, creating whimsical videos and a blog to demystify a complicated process, and analyzing Bub’s genetic material to discover what makes her so very unusual.
Soon they were drafting an email to Lil Bub’s owner in Indiana, inquiring whether they might be allowed to sequence the genome of this feline sensation. Mike Bridavsky, who refers to himself as Bub’s dude, said he did not hesitate to send a blood sample, though he jokes that the results were a tad disappointing.
Instead, they found in an initial test that Lil Bub’s polydactyly resulted from the same gene mutation that causes it in Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-toed cats, generations of which have lived at the writer’s former home in Key West, Fla. That mutation is different from those that cause polydactyly in cats outside North America, which means Bub is somehow related to the Hemingway cats.
First, they compared her genome to that of a reference cat, then they focused on genes that control bodily functions. Finally, they asked a colleague who specializes in bone disorders which of those are known to cause osteopetrosis. The researchers said they plan to publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal but decided to first place them, and the complete data set, in the open-access journal bioRxiv, in the hope other scientists might make other Lil Bub-related discoveries, such as the cat’s breeds.
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