People have the impression that white rabbits are always jumping and very cute. But there is a white rabbit called sauteur d’Alfort breed, they do not jump, but used to walk upside down.
A study published March 25 in the journal Public Library of Science – Genetics (PLOS Genetics) explores the genetic causes of this particular gait.
Many animals, not just rabbits, have this gait of moving their bodies in a hopping manner, like kangaroos and hares, including certain classes of rodents. Researchers compared the genes of some common white rabbits with those of this type of white rabbit that only walks upside down and did find some differences.
They found that the rabbits that walked upside down had a variation in the gene for RAR-related orphan receptor beta (RORB), a family of nuclear receptors that are members of the intracellular transcription factors ROR-alpha (RORA), -beta (RORB) and -gamma (RORC).
In the normal rabbit, there are sufficient RORB proteins throughout the nervous system, but in the mutated condition, the number of RORB-producing neurons in the spinal cord is reduced, and the rabbit develops the behavior of walking upside down.
Other studies have previously explored a similar problem in which mice were unable to walk or run at a normal pace as normal mice, and researchers found that this was also related to the RORB gene variation.
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