Figure 2  The deH Pigmentation Phenotype
(A) 10-wk-old deH/deH and nonmutant animals on a at background. A thin stripe of yellow hair normally separates the dorsal black hairs from the ventral cream hairs. In deH, the yellow stripe is extended dorsally, and the boundary between the yellow and the black hairs is fuzzier.
(B) Skin slices taken from 1.5-mo-old deH/deH and nonmutant littermates (scale bar = 0.5 cm).
(C) Proportion of total skin area as determined by observation of pelts taken from the interlimb region. The proportion occupied by the yellow lateral compartment (± SEM) differs between mutant and nonmutant littermate flanks (p < 0.0005, paired t-test, n = 6 pairs). There is also (data not shown) a small increase in the proportion of total skin area occupied by the ventral cream-colored compartment, 47.9 % in mutant compared to 37.8% in nonmutant (p < 0.005, paired t-test, n = 6 pairs).
(D) On an ae/ae background, the extent of dorsal skin pigmentation is reduced in deH/deH neonates (P3.5).
(E) Hair length in a representative pair of 1.5-mo-old deH/deH and nonmutant littermates, averaged over three skin slices at different rostrocaudal levels, and plotted as a function of the absolute distance from middorsum or the percentage of total slice length. To investigate whether deH affects other dorsoventral skin characteristics besides pigment-type switching, we examined its effects on hair length and pigmentation in an ae/ae background.