Combing through cat fur DNA
Elinor Karlsson is in the business of animal DNA. As director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, she sequences and compares mammalian genomes to figure out, among other things, why some animals seem immune to diseases that consistently waylay humans and whether genetic causes are behind certain animal traits and health conditions.
Earlier this year, Karlsson began to tap a new source of genetic information: cat fur.
Through a citizen science project they started called Darwin’s Cats, Karlsson and former Broad Institute researcher Chad Nusbaum have taken on the task of sequencing fur samples for genetic data. Karlsson estimates that each fur sample yields 10 million–20 million data points—not the cat’s entire genome but enough to extrapolate information.
The fur is effectively crowdsourced. Cat owners fill out surveys detailing information about their cats: age, behavior, health conditions, and even where they choose to sleep in relation to their humans. For a $150 donation, Karlsson and Nusbaum’s group will send a participant a tiny comb to use to brush a bit of their cat’s fur. (Many cats enjoy this step, Nusbaum reports.) The combs happen to fit perfectly inside standard 15 mL screw cap test tubes, so the fur-laden combs get loaded into those, then shipped back for analysis. So far, “1,000 cats have chosen to do sequencing,” Karlsson tells Newscripts. “There’s 17,261 cats that have registered, and they’ve answered about 1.2 million questions, which is pretty cool.”
When Newscripts points out that Karlsson is ascribing these actions to the cats rather than their owners, she laughs but doubles down. “The cats are very enthusiastic,” she says. “They’re like, ‘Man, this science stuff is so cool.’ ”
Please don’t cite the cat
A tabby cat stretches his front paw over a partially completed jigsaw puzzle on a table.
Paws-itively puzzled: “Professor” Larry Richardson exercises his brain.
Credit:
Reese Richardson
Meanwhile, another cat is busy making a name for himself in mathematics. Larry Richardson is a large tabby cat owned by the grandmother of Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University. Larry has landed himself in hot water a few times over the last year-plus.
First, in mid-2024, Larry became an unwitting participant in a project designed to unearth scientific fraud: specifically, how a rich underground industry was fueling dubious academic profiles. It all started when fluid dynamics researcher and occasional fraud investigator Nick Wise showed Richardson (the human) an ad he’d come across from a paper mill. Pay the mill $300, and it would generate a bunch of nonsensical papers with citations to your—presumably—real work and upload those papers to ResearchGate. Then, you’d wait for Google Scholar to index the citations and boost your profile.
Simple enough, Richardson and Wise decided. They decided to replicate the experiment, with an added step for pure whimsy: they would create an author profile for a real cat and generate papers in his name, with the goal of engineering the world’s most-cited cat, a record previously held by Chester, physicist Jack H. Hetherington’s beloved Siamese.
“We took inventory of all the cats in our lives, and we realized that the cat with the most academic-sounding name was my grandma’s cat, Larry Richardson,” Richardson tells Newscripts. It took only about 2 weeks for Larry to beat out his predecessor, with 144 citations on Google Scholar.
The ensuing media coverage led Google Scholar to take down the account, and Larry lay low for a while. But his name popped up again earlier this summer. Richardson created a profile under Larry’s name and likeness on the website ScienceGuardians, which describes itself as “the first fully verified journal club” and an alternative to PubPeer, another site where scientists comment on papers. Larry did need an email address ending in .edu, but Richardson was able to set that up through Northwestern without issue.
Richardson says Larry’s ScienceGuardians account was approved in 2 h. He logged in as Larry and commented on a few articles about mice. After a couple of anticlimactic days, Richardson posted about it on Bluesky. The people behind ScienceGuardians were not happy, but Larry is nonplussed.
“Larry’s fantastic. He’s living the same life that he always has,” Richardson says. “Every time I come over, my grandma’s like, ‘The professor is waiting to see you.’ ”
Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.
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