Chemistry is no catwalk

Combing through cat fur DNAElinor Karlsson is in the business of animal DNA. As director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, she sequences and compares mammalian genomes to figure out, among other things, why some animals seem immune to diseases that consistently waylay humans and whether genetic causes are behind certain animal traits and health conditions.Earlier this year, Karlsson began to tap a new source of genetic information: cat fur.Through a citizen science project they started called Darwin’s Cats, Karlsson and former Broad Institute researcher Chad Nusbaum have taken on the task of sequencing fur samples for genetic data. Karlsson estimates that each fur sample yields 10 million–20 million data points—not the cat’s entire genome but enough to extrapolate information.The fur is effectively crowdsourced. Cat owners fill out surveys detailing information about their cats: age, behavior, health conditions, and even where they choose to sleep in relation to their humans. For a $150 donation, Karlsson and Nusbaum’s group will send a participant a tiny comb to use to brush a bit of their cat’s fur. (Many cats enjoy this step, Nusbaum reports.) The combs happen to fit perfectly inside standard 15 mL screw cap test tubes, so the fur-laden combs get loaded into those, then shipped back for analysis. So far, “1,000 cats have chosen to do sequencing,” Karlsson tells Newscripts. “There’s 17,261 cats that have registered, and they’ve answered about 1.2 million questions, which is pretty cool.”When Newscripts points out that Karlsson