Washington - Dario Lupianez is the author of dense scientific papers with titles including "Breaking TADs: How alterations of chromatin domains result in disease." Now he, as one member of an international team of molecular biologists, is also a co-author of a paper on the extraordinary genetics of celebrity cat Lil Bub.
Lil Bub is a kitten-size cat with 2 million Instagram followers, a talk show, a stage production, an album and a book. The new study reveals the weird DNA behind what is often described as her magical appeal.
"We can definitely say she's magical," said Lupianez, who lives in Berlin and who, like his colleagues, has never actually met Lil Bub in person. "I remember the moment when we first saw her on the Skype video and we were just like, 'Uhhhhh.' "
In some respects, Lupianez and his partners in this project, fellow Berlin resident Daniel Ibrahim and University of Pennsylvania's Orsolya Symmons, now know Lil Bub more intimately than pretty much anyone. They spent four years crowdfunding money to sequence the cat's genome, creating whimsical videos and a blog to demystify a complicated process, and analyzing Bub's genetic material to discover what makes her so very unusual.
It helps to know what Lil Bub looks like to understand why they did this. The cat has a short snout, enormous green eyes and a pink tongue that hangs from her stunted jaw like an errant piece of bubble gum. She never developed teeth, and she stopped growing around four pounds. Each of her paws boasts an extra toe, for a total of 22. (Six on the front paws, five on the back.)
When Ibrahim first learned about Lil Bub a few years on a video about celebrity cats - "I had 40 minutes," he explains - a lightbulb went off. He and Lupianez were both working in a genetics lab that studied bone disorders and limb malformations, and "this was similar to what we see in patients, except this was a cat," Ibrahim recalled. He dashed to Lupianez's office, where they began musing about gene mutations.
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"She's quite literally one in infinity, you could say, as far as a genetic anomaly," Bridavsky said of the cat he found in a tool shed shortly after her birth in 2011. "I personally was convinced that they would find that her DNA was not from our planet, which is what I was hoping for, or there was some crazy prehistoric DNA - that she was part dinosaur."
Lupianez and Ibrahim, for their part, wondered whether the cat's two already-diagnosed conditions - polydactyly, the term for her extra digits, and the rare bone-hardening disorder osteopetrosis - might be the result of one gene mutation, which would be an important finding.
Instead, they found in an initial test that Lil Bub's polydactyly resulted from the same gene mutation that causes it in Ernest Hemingway's famous six-toed cats, generations of which have lived at the writer's former home in Key West, Florida. That mutation is different from those that cause polydactyly in cats outside North America, which means Bub is somehow related to the Hemingway cats.
"This is pretty cool," said Lupianez, who heads a lab at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine. "Lil Bub is an orphan cat . . . but actually her DNA encodes information about her past."