Coat Color
Chocolate
Alternative Names: Brown, Chestnut
The Chocolate variant results in medium to dark brown or chocolate colored hair instead of black hair.
More Info
Did you know?
A chocolate coat color is the result of lower amounts of dark pigment in the hair. Lilac, the dilute version of the brown coat color, is considered one of the rarer coat colors as it requires two copies of the recessive Chocolate variant as well as two copies of the recessive Dilution variant.
How it works
Cats with either two copies of the Chocolate variant or one copy of the Chocolate variant and one copy of the Cinnamon variant are likely to have a chocolate coat color.
Prevalence
2 in 10 cats
have one or more copy of this genetic variant in our testing.
Technical Details
| Gene | TYRP |
|---|---|
| Variant | G>A |
| Chromosome | D4 |
| Coordinate | 40,081,229 |
All coordinates reference FelCat9.0
References & Credit
Credit to our scientific colleagues:
Lyons, L. A., Foe, I. T., Rah, H. C., & Grahn, R. A. (2005). Chocolate coated cats: TYRP1 mutations for brown color in domestic cats. Mammalian Genome, 16(5), 356–366. View the article
Schmidt-Küntzel, A., Eizirik, E., O’Brien, S. J., & Menotti-Raymond, M. (2005). Tyrosinase and tyrosinase related protein I alleles specify domestic cat coat color phenotypes of the albino and brown loci. Journal of Heredity, 96(4), 289–301. View the article