Natural gene / phase 1
Pangaré — the pale underside
Also called mealy. The pale muzzle, eye rings, belly, flanks and inner legs of an Exmoor pony, a Fjord or a Haflinger: the soft parts of the horse go cream and the topline does not.
Crossing two of them
This gene has no effect on the horse’s health.
Breeds
Five breeds name the locus, at rates that follow the study’s marker
frequencies rather than being invented: Exmoor Pony and
Norwegian Fjord near-fixed, Icelandic Horse
common, Shetland Pony and Suffolk Punch
moderate. Every other breed is pa/pa, because a breed that does
not name a coat locus gets it wild; the feral population carries the full
spread.
Its gene carrot
- Gene key
- horsegenetics.pangare
- Alleles
- Pa2 Pa1 pa
- Outcomes
- wild,
trace-pangare,mild-pangare,pangare,strong-pangare - Default allele
- pa
- Priority
PangareGene.PRIORITY— immediately after sooty, its mirror- Founder draws
- 1 × nextFloat()
- Deterministic
- no when expressed
- Epi draws
- 1 × nextFloat — the expression roll
- Health
- none established
Covered by PangareGeneTest and the golden file, and eyeballed as
side views. Not seen in a game. See
verification §0-U.
The exact mirror of sooty
Sooty keeps black along the topline; pangaré takes red away from the underside. Both are one region-weighted move on one pigment, they sit next to each other in the order, and between them they are the two halves of countershading. A horse carrying both is the textbook version: dark back, pale belly.
The reference gives a long list of rules for how pangaré should render on each base. Every one of them falls out of removing red rather than removing lightness, and none of them is a special case in the gene:
- Chestnut — maximum visibility. Nothing masks the red, so taking it walks the sample toward cream and pale gold.
- Bay — the red-brown body lightens and the black points do not. A point is stored as red 0 and black 1: there is no red on it to take.
- Black — nothing visible at all. A black horse’s red is entirely masked by its black, and the gradient’s bottom row is one colour whatever the red says. The reference calls pangaré hard to recognise on black; here it is invisible, exactly.
- Double dilute — visually redundant, because the coat is already nearly out of red.
The dosage
| Combination | Dosage | Outcome | What shows |
|---|---|---|---|
pa/pa | 0 | wild type | nothing |
Pa1/pa | 1 | trace-pangare | a pale lower muzzle and faint eye rings |
Pa1/Pa1, Pa2/pa | 2 | mild-pangare | pale muzzle and eye rings, a light underline, soft patches behind the elbows |
Pa2/Pa1 | 3 | pangare | the familiar mealy horse — pale jaw, belly, groin, flank and inner legs |
Pa2/Pa2 | 4 | strong-pangare | broad cream soft areas climbing the barrel; outer legs and black points still dark |
A pale muzzle alone does not identify the trait — ordinary shade
variation looks the same, which is what trace-pangare is for.
Where it sits
The weights are the reference’s own region table; what the gene adds is the shapes they hang on. Muzzle 1.00, eye rings 0.90, belly 0.92, groin 0.82, behind the elbow 0.74, jaw 0.72, flank 0.70, inner leg 0.70, lower neck 0.30, outer leg 0.12, and nothing at all on the mane, tail, ears or dorsal line — a horse with a pale mane has flaxen, silver or cream instead.
The inside of a leg — a helper that did not exist
Every other region helper in CoatRegions addresses a
part. “The inside of a leg” is a
face of a part, which is a different question, and it is
why this went undrawn: a leg is a box, its four sides are all at the same
distance from its own axis, and nothing about a body point distinguishes
the inner side from the outer. The information was in the
Face the visitor is already handed, and was simply going
unused.
CoatRegions.medial is that, and the reason it is a shared
helper rather than eight lines in this file is the per-leg mirror: a leg
on the horse’s right faces inward on its left side and a
leg on the left faces inward on its right. Written out per gene,
that is exactly the kind of thing one of the four legs quietly gets
backwards.
It has two users, which is what the gap asked for before it was built: this, and the seal brown’s soft points, whose fifth and last one is the pale inner limb.
Health
There is no established pangaré-associated disease, defect or
welfare problem, and the mod gives it no
TraitContribution.
The trap is that the EDN3 region has been tied, in later work, to exercise blood pressure and harness-racing performance in coldblooded trotters. That is a regulatory haplotype under study in a racing population, not a pangaré test: a mealy Fjord is not hypertensive and is not athletically limited.
And it is not frame overo, whose lethal white foal syndrome comes from EDNRB — a different gene with a confusingly similar name.
What is actually known
No confirmed causal mutation and no test. Breeders have treated pangaré as heritable for as long as anyone has kept records — it is near-fixed in several breeds — but its inheritance mode is unresolved, and the very wide range of intensity points at several loci rather than one.
The nearest thing to evidence is a 2018 population study of a region on chromosome 22 about 50 kb downstream of EDN3, whose allele frequencies split sharply between athletic breeds and the pony and draft breeds where mealy is pervasive:
| Marker at | Breeds |
|---|---|
| 99–98% | Fjord, Haflinger, Exmoor |
| 90–74% | North Swedish Draught, Gotlandsruss, Ardennes, Icelandic |
| 58% | Shetland |
| 8–1% | Quarter Horse, Swedish Warmblood, Shire, Thoroughbred |
That is an association between a marker and a breed group, not a cause, and the authors said so. So the locus here is a dosage with a per-horse roll — the same shape as flaxen, sooty and the bay shade score — and the population evidence lands where it actually belongs, in the breed frequencies.
common/genetics/genes/PangareGene.java,
common/coat/pattern/CoatRegions.medial