KITLG and cancer: The analysis was performed in darkly pigmented cases of DSCC and control dogs, and a high copy number of this CNV was identified as the susceptibility locus; however, this effect was only found in eumelanistic cases with functional MC1R. KITLG variants have been implicated in melanoma, testicular cancer, colorectal cancer, and general cancer risk in humans [55,56,57,58].