The Siamese is the most well known of the pointed breeds, with its characteristic dark points on a light background. The non-agouti cinnamon and fawn colors are seen most often in the Oriental and British Shorthair. Fawnįawn is dilute of cinnamon (above) and resembles the lilac coat color, but is lighter. The cinnamon coat is a warm-brown shade compared to the rich brown of the chocolate color and is produced by a second recessive allele (variation of a gene) of B (black) which causes an elongation of the pigment granule and is denoted by the symbol b l. The coat color is a pale grey with a rich pink tone. It is seen most frequently in purebred cats, especially the Burmese, Oriental and British shorthair. Lilac is dilute chocolate and bears the same relationship to brown as blue does to black.
Since the B gene is dominant over the locus, cats heterozygous for it ( B/b or B/b l genotype), carry chocolate or cinnamon gene but it cannot be recognized based on phenotype. The chocolate (b) allele is dominant over the cinnamon (b l) allele. Two mutations of the B gene have been identified, b (brown or chocolate) and b l (light brown or cinnamon). Chocolate is frequently referred to as a rare color, but it is quite common in purebred cats, especially Orientals and British Shorthairs. The brown coat color ( b) is a variation of black ( B) coat color and is caused by a mutation that leads to reduced amounts of black pigment which causes them to appear brown and is recessive to black. You can view more beautiful pictures of brown cats in our article “ Why are brown cats rare?“. The British Blue, Russian Blue, Korat and Nebelung are the most well-known breeds with blue coats, but the color can also occur in mixed-breed cats. Black and red are dominant, and therefore only one copy of the gene is needed for the cat to show these colors.įirst, let’s look at relatively rare colors:īlue (grey) is dilute black, the color is chemically black (eumelanin), but melanin granules clump in the hair shaft resulting in colorless areas which allow more light to pass through the hair and lightening the color. Every other coat color is a deviation of those two colors. There are only two true colors in cats, black and red.A dominant gene overrides a recessive gene, and two copies of a recessive gene must be present for that trait to develop. Genes come in pairs, one from the mother and one from the father, and can be dominant or recessive.
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