Lutino - pink-eyed dilution Gene P
It's a colour, not a breed
When Danish breeder Gerner Rassmussen first handled his new litter of Netherland Dwarfs in 1985, he had no idea he was about to make history.
One of the babies was not the expected Harlequin pattern.... but an entirely new colour, with red eyes.
Gerner kept the unusually coloured youngster, and set about trying to produce more. In the third litter he was lucky enough to find a doe which went on to produce a total of 7 Lutinos, and these formed the basis of the brand-new colour variety - the first rabbit colour gene mutation since 1924.
Lutino became a recognised Nordic Rabbit Standard colour from 1 October 1988, and was first exhibited at the National Exhibition in Aalborg in 1989.
Sue Brown (Withyhays)
It's a mutation in the structure of a transmembrane protein, altering transport across cell membranes. In the skin, it reduces the distribution of eumelanin, but in the eyes it limits pigment production completely. Not well studied in rabbits, but there is a fair amount of published material using mice as the model organism.