Leopards can’t change their spots? Cheetahs can

How the cat got his blotches
September 2012. As any cat lover knows, distinct patterns of dark and light hair colour are apparent not only in housecats but also in their wild relatives, from cheetahs to tigers to snow leopards. Researchers at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and Stanford University, along with colleagues around the world, have reported new genetic findings that help to understand the molecular basis of these patterns in all felines.
A so-called "mackerel tabby" cat has dark tiger stripes, which coalesce into swirls and blotches in a "classic tabby" cat. Like other periodic natural patterns such as stripes on a zebra or spinal bones and vertebra, the origin of these repetitive structures is an unsolved mystery. "Until now, there's been no obvious biological explanation for cheetah spots or the stripes on tigers, zebras or even the ordinary house cat," said Gregory Barsh, M.D., Ph.D., faculty investigator at HudsonAlpha and emeritus professor of genetics at Stanford University, one of the senior authors of the study.

King cheetah
When comparing sequence differences between striped and blotched domestic cats, the researchers saw the evidence pointed to a gene that they named Taqpep. Blotched cats had specific mutations in both copies of this gene, while striped cats did not. Remarkably, the rare "king cheetah," once thought to be a unique species because of an unusual striped pattern rather than regular spots, also carried a mutation in Taqpep.
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