Scientists are getting closer to figuring out what determines the patterns that animals wear. Rivka Galchen’s story takes a look into how research is progressing with two examples, the patterned skin of boxfish and the stripes of African striped mice.
There was a set of genes that they had identified but whose role they didn’t understand. Further experiments predicted that they might underlie the patterning. With genome editing—CRISPR—they bred mice with one of those genes knocked out; just as their mathematical model predicted, the width of the stripes had changed.