Genes that turned wildcats into kitty cats.

Reaction of my Abyssinian cat, Melvin, to finding that his genome had been sequenced.

David Grimm summarizes work by Montague et al., who sequenced the genome of a female Abyssinian cat, a domestic breed, and compared it with genome assemblies of six other domestic breeds, two wild cat species, and four other mammals to find genomic differences that might underlie cat biology and domestication. The authors found that, compared with wild cat genomes, domestic cat genomes displayed evidence of natural selection in genes linked to memory, fear-conditioning behavior, and stimulus-reward learning, suggesting that the genetic changes may underlie the evolution of tameness.