Blue eyed but deaf kitties : weirdness or pleiotropy?

gentleshaid (70)in #steemstem • 7 years ago (edited)

Credit I Pixabay

Kitties!

There is no gainsaying in the fact that cats have gain an amazing recognition in the cryptocurrency world recently, in form of cryptokitties. Interestingly, a lot of weird things have been attributed to cats. Perhaps they are true, perhaps not, what I do believe is that most of these weird attributions vary from culture to culture, especially, in Africa - I really do not know about other parts of the world. Well, I know that a lot of steemians in Europe adore cats, I almost got myself an enemy in one of the chat channels by making a joke that cat meats are delicious (are they?). A good example of weirdness attributed to cats is found in my house, where my woman will never allow me to bring cats into the house because she believes they bring bad lucks...funny? I know.

Do you know that a group of cats is known as clowder?

Deafness and blue eyes in cats

Credit I Pixabay

One of the weirdest attributes of cats according to some laymen is that most cats with blue eyes are always deaf, yes deaf! When I was younger, I use to consider this as being weird truly until 2005, when Hartl and Jones conducted a research and made a scientific report that about four out of ten (40%) cats with blue eyes always turn out to be deaf as well. The initial observation was that cats with one blue eye and one yellow eye were all deaf only on the blue eye side.

Do you know that a cat lover is called an Ailurophilia?

After series of research and analysis, an interesting version of this phenomenon was found in human in form of Waardenburg syndrome and several other abnormality in humans. People suffering from this syndrome suffer total or partial hearing disability as a result of certain pigmentation in their eyes, skin or hair. Genetically, the implication of this is that it is most likely the same gene controls hearing ability and pigmentation in both cats and humans. A phenomenon by which a gene controls the expression of two characters or traits is known as pleiotropy.

Pleiotropic genes and independent assortment of genes

There are no doubts that Gregor Mendel did an amazing job in unraveling a lot of mysteries about the principles behind inheritance using the pea plant. His contributions led to formulation of law of segregation and law of independent assortment of genes. However, these rules have been found to have their own exceptions. One of the exceptions of Mendel's law of independent assortment of genes is pleiotropy - a form of gene interaction. According to him, genes that confer traits on organisms are suppose to be inherited independently of one another. If this were to be the case, expression of two traits are not supposed to have been linked to a single gene as in the case of cats and many other organisms.

Do you know that cats make about 100 different sounds?

So whenext you see a cat with either one or two blue eyes, wow will you be able to determine whether they having partial or total hearing loss? Having said that, I think I still want a cat in my house or at least get a crypokitty.

Till my next write up. Do feel free to engage me through creative comments and contributions, afterall, nobody knows it all.