PATN1 Discovery and What it Means for Breeders

The saying, “It takes a leopard to make a leopard” is a familiar one to many Appaloosa breeders. 

In order to identify the genetic mechanism behind the leopard-specific appaloosa spotting pattern, we began by looking at the progeny records of several stallions.  We decided to use few spot and snowcap stallions for this study because they are homozygous for LP (read more about LP)  thus all of the offspring would have a spotting pattern or at least characteristics which enabled us to track the amount of white spotting on a large number of horses.