The Famous Gorilla Snow Flake Gene Mutations
Snowflake was famous for being the only known albino gorilla in the world.
A western lowland gorilla, he lived at the zoo until his death from skin cancer in 2003.
He was born in the wild with albinism - a genetic mutation that caused him to lack color pigments in his skin and hair - but was captured by villagers in Equatorial Guinea in 1966.
His iconic coloring also put him on the cover of Basement Jaxx's 2001 album, Rooty.
Before he died, a vial of blood was taken and frozen to preserve it and the genome was sequenced in 2012.
As reported in the journal BMC Genomics, the researchers, led by Tomas Marques-Bonet at the University of Pompeu Fabra, in Spain, were then able to take this sequencing and compare it to non-albino gorilla genomes to find the cause of his genetic mutation.
The scientists isolated Snowflake's albinism to a single gene called SLC45A2.
Snowflake inherited this mutation directly from his parents and when the researchers delved further into the DNA of his mother and father they discovered stretches of Snowflake's DNA from both parents were identical.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2344307/Worlds-albino-gorilla-lost-colour--ultimately-died--parents-inbred-claims-scientists.html#ixzz4WsxIrnur
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
For more information..
http://www.livescience.com/37445-snowflake-albino-gorilla-inbred.html
So I honestly just wanted to comment and say that your blogs are all pretty awesome. I have never bogged before this class.. I could use a lesson in how you do backgrounds and add different pictures and everything. I love your picture of the mutated albino gorilla.. This was probably my favorite class lesson so far. I never knew there was one mutation per every 100,000 genes per species. Also, it was cool to think about that in a since that every human has 100,000 genes and therefor statistically we all have 1 mutation.
ReplyDelete