| Functional |
"The major components of hair are alpha-keratins and keratin-associated proteins (KAPs), each of which is encoded by separate gene families [4,5]. (...)All hair-keratins are expressed in the hair shaft, and a subgroup of them is also expressed in claws and nails [4]. The critical role of hair-keratins in hair biology is revealed by the fact that a variety of epidermal diseases are caused by mutations
in single hair-keratin genes [5]." |
10.1186/1471-2164-15-869 |
| Mutation Description |
"Regarding the other type II keratins, the cetacean species also exclusively lost K79, and the minke
whale is the only species where K75 is a pseudogene (Figure 1)." |
10.1186/1471-2164-15-869 |
| Methodology & Validation |
"In order to characterize the gene repertoire present in the keratin gene clusters in laurasiatherian mammals, we manually annotated keratin genes in the genomes of representative species of all major lineages for which genomic information was available." |
10.1186/1471-2164-15-869 |
| Phenotypic |
"Interestingly, some of the gene losses we observed are shared by both species examined in this study, suggesting that they are the most likely candidates to explain the hairless phenotype in this group of mammals." |
10.1186/1471-2164-15-869 |