“A New Finnish Flavor of Feline Coat Coloration, ‘Salmiak’, Is Associated With a 95-Kb Deletion Downstream of the KIT Gene”, Heidi Anderson, Milla Salonen, Sari Toivola, Matthew Blades, Leslie A. Lyons, Oliver P. Forman, Marjo K. Hytönen, Hannes Lohi2024-05-09 (cat genetics)⁠:

Cats with a distinctive white hair pattern of unknown molecular cause have been discovered in the Finnish domestic cat population. Based on the unique appearance of these cats, we have named this phenotype salmiak (“salty licorice”).

The use of a commercially available panel test to genotype 4 salmiak-colored cats revealed the absence of all known variants associated with white-haired phenotypic loci: full White (W), Spotting (W^s), and the Birman white-gloves-associated (w^g) allele of the KIT proto-oncogene gene.

Whole-genome sequencing on two salmiak-colored cats was conducted to search for candidate causal variants in the KIT gene. Despite a lack of coding variants, visual inspection of the short read alignments revealed a large ~95 kb deletion located ~65 kb downstream of the KIT gene in the salmiak cats.

Additional PCR genotyping of 180 domestic cats and 3 salmiak-colored cats confirmed the homozygous derived variant genotype fully concordant with the salmiak phenotype.

We suggest the newly identified variant be designated as w^sal for “w salmiak”.

/doc/psychology/vision/1992-shepard.pdf The perceptual organization of colors: An adaptation to regularities of the terrestrial world? Roger N. Shepard 1992-01 2024-05-26 evolution

This chapter of [Cosmides & Tooby1992, The Adapted Mind] considers some characteristics of the perception and representation of colors that, although not universal in animal vision, do appear to be universal in the normal color vision of humans, prevalent in other primates, and common in a number of other quite different but also highly visual species, including the birds and the bees. [perceptual constancy of color; 3D structure of color in general; color circle of pure colors; perception of color as a hierarchy of categories & prototypes]

Questions raised are (1) whether these characteristics of color perception and representation are merely arbitrary design features of these particular species, (2) whether these characteristics arose as specific adaptations to the particular environmental niches in which these species evolved, or (3) whether they may have emerged as advanced adaptations to some properties that prevail throughout the terrestrial environment.

See Also:

• The Color Currency of Nature

• Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw ‘The Dress” Differently: Remember “the dress’? It disrupted our understanding of color, and, yes, it took science two years to catch up

• Shared understanding of color among sighted and blind adults

• The Biological Basis of a Universal Constraint on Color Naming: Cone Contrasts and the Two-Way Categorization of Colors

• Can Language Models Encode Perceptual Structure Without Grounding? A Case Study in Color

• Measurement invariance explains the universal law of generalization for psychological perception

• Universal representations: The missing link between faces, text, planktons, and cat breeds