this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Beautiful cat! Thanks. Is there any particular reason to think it's a chimera? If it's a female, it's more likely to be X chromosome inactivation.
Do you get X inactivation with such clean divisions? I thought it was a stochastic process much later in development? This isn't my area so I'm relying on something like high school biology on this one.
I'm here for the ride, because I don't know, either, but I feel like you are correct based on my memory from my high school biology class.
I actually don't know, it's a good point. It's definitely stochastic, but I don't know how late in the development it happens. There are definitely cats with colours completely jumbled cats with large patches of each colour. But I just realised that colour comes from melanocytes. And melanocytes must migrate from the back, as they come from neural crest. Which strikes me as a great reason for straight division on the front (the cells coming from left and right meet there) that we see here, regardless of the origin of diversity of cell colours. So I think it shouldn't matter, but it's just a guess.