Lil Bub, the queen of the Internet, is expanding her reign to the wide world of scientific inquiry.
A team of three scientists will sequence the perma-kitten's genome, potentially unveiling the science at work behind the distinctive look that made Bub famous.
The team, comprised of Daniel M. Ibrahim, Darío G. Lupiáñez and Uschi Symmons, set up a crowdfunding campaign for the experiment, which has already surpassed its original goal of $6,500. The extra funding will go towards research on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a commonly diagnosed heart disease in cats.
Scientists are most interested in Lil Bub's paws -- specifically, the number of digits on each. Bub shares a genetic mutation called polydactyly with cats famously owned by author Ernest Hemingway, Gizmodo reports. But while the mutation in Hemingway's cats gave each an extra digit (six in total) on each front paw, Bub has an extra digit on all four of her paws. This leads the team of scientists to believe that something else is lurking in the cat's DNA that reinforces the basic polydactyly.
“I think you can achieve certain things by looking at only little bits and pieces, which we’ve done for the Hemingway mutation, but I think we’ll see a lot more if we have the entire genome sequenced," Symmons told Gizmodo.
The team is also interested in another of Bub's rare conditions called osteopetrosis, which causes bone to become denser than it should be. The scientists posit that this condition could explain Bub's distinctive short snout and teeny teeth. Though both Bub's polydactylyl and osteopetrosis conditions are rare on their own and even more so when seen in the same cat, in Bub's case, scientists are pretty sure the two aren't connected.
Now that the study has been fully funded, Bub's blood will be shipped off to the sequencing facility at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, where Ibrahim and Lupiáñez work.
Then again, it could turn out that Bub is just a perfectly normal cat. We'll have to wait and see.
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BONUS: Lil Bub and Tuna the Chiweenie meet for the first time