I understand that the leopard phenotype has been identified as carrying mutations in the cx41.8 gene. However, is that the only gene whose mutation produces said phenotype?
A starting point could be the ZFIN site search, which produces 1.5 pages of alleles with the query "adult melanocyte irregular spatial pattern, abnormal". Now, not all of these will look like leopard, they also include melanocyte quality changes, or other structures being affected. The return includes kita or rose which clearly do not look like leopards per se, but have a similar, spotty phenotype. But this is where I'd' start.
http://zfin.org/action/quicksearch/query?query=adult+melanocyte+irregular+spatial+pattern%2C+abnormal&page=2
Hmm... Let me ask my 1st postdoc mentor Dr. Steve Johnson (http://genetics.wustl.edu/sjlab/home/) and I will get back to you..^_^
Check e.g. http://www.phenomicdb.de.
"leopard" there finds 15 genotypes and 61 phenotypes.
Give it a trial.
Dr. Weiss,
I believe Dr. Maximino is ONLY referring to the "leopard" mutant in Zebrafish Danio, not other species. If you restricted your search on http://www.phenomicdb.de by selecting "zebrafish" as your targrting organism you would find ZERO hit(s).
Anyway, thank you so much for referencing PhenomicDB! I learned something new Today! Yay!!
Have a great "Blue Monday" everyone, where ever you may be! ^_^
Tim Hung-Po Chen
WUSM Orthopaedics
Tim Chen,
yes you are right. The point I wanted to make is that the interesting thing about phenomicDB is actually, that you would find genes in other organisms that produce a phenotype having the word "leopard" in their description ,which then may point you back (by orthology) to Zfin genes which may be responsible for your phenotype of interesst albeit they have so far not been described wih such a phenotype.
In Homo sapiens there is a "leopard syndrome" described (and see the genes associated with it in phenomicdb) with a pigment disorder (therefore the name). I thought it may be interesting to Caio to check the orthologous genes in ZFIN.
Sometimes it may be a detour that brings you to your objective.
Check out this paper -http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/pdf/Iovine/Eastman%20et%20al.%202006.pdf and
also Dr. Kathy Iovine's research at Leign U. - http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/iovine.html in case
you are interested in not just Cx41.8 (leo), but also other gap juction genes in Zebrafish Danio.
Good Luck everyone,
Tim H.-P. Chen
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