Blog

As we celebrate our five-year anniversary, Basepaws is as committed as ever to our amazing community of pet parents. This is truly a celebration of you, since your unwavering loyalty and support has been integral to this journey. We’ve come a long way since our early days as a startup company, so we want to take this opportunity to share some updates about our feline health product pricing as we expand our operations, team, and product offerings.

Today, we’re decoding one of the mysteries of genetics that relates to your Basepaws DNA report of results. It's called epistasis. When epistasis occurs, the observable expression (phenotype) of a gene—such as one responsible for the color of your kitty's coat—gets modified in some way by a completely different gene that has the ability to mask, suppress, or inhibit how that coat color gene is expressed. Epistasis helps explain why sometimes you may get a “likely to have” result for a genetic trait in your cat’s Basepaws report that doesn’t quite match up with their physical appearance.

From time to time, we update the Basepaws digital report of results for our Breed + Health Cat DNA Test. Today, we’d like to take a moment to share some details about two recent changes to our report—one for a genetic health marker linked to the common cat heart condition hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and one for a genetic trait marker associated with the Siamese colorpoint coat pattern.