Bengal cat PK deficiency DNA test

Your vet is right to flag this — Pyruvate Kinase deficiency is a real concern in Bengals, and it's good that you're taking it seriously. Before you go down the consumer test route, it's worth being honest with you: for a genuine health status result on a specific genetic condition your vet has flagged, the gold standard is a veterinary diagnostic lab test, not a consumer kit. That said, consumer tests like Basepaws do include PK-Def screening and can give you a useful preliminary answer — they just vary in how they report clinical variants versus benign ones. Is your Bengal showing any symptoms at all, or is this purely precautionary based on the breed?

That makes a lot of sense, and in that context a consumer test is a reasonable first step. If it comes back clear, you've got peace of mind at low cost. If it flags something, you'd go back to your vet for a confirmatory diagnostic test before treating it as definitive anyway. What I'd point you toward is the Basepaws Breed + Health Cat DNA Test — it specifically screens for PK-Def (the PKLR gene variant), which is the one relevant to Bengals and Abyssinians. It also gives you a full breed breakdown and screens for a range of other heritable conditions. Does he have a known pedigree or is his Bengal background mixed or uncertain?

Perfect — then the breed breakdown part of the test is just a bonus you won't really need, but the health panel is exactly what you're after. Basepaws screens for over 40 genetic mutations including PK-Def, and the report clearly distinguishes between carrier status and affected status, which matters a lot here. Being a carrier of one copy typically doesn't cause disease — it's two copies (homozygous) that leads to the condition. The test is a cheek swab, results come back in three to six weeks, and it's straightforwardly available on Amazon UK. I'd still recommend sharing the result with your vet rather than interpreting it alone, especially if it shows any variant — they'll know what follow-up looks like for a healthy two-year-old with no symptoms.

For a consumer test, Basepaws is the strongest option available for cats in the UK right now. The main alternative would be going directly through a veterinary genetics lab — Laboklin and Langford Vets both offer targeted PK-Def testing in the UK, and those are the tests diagnostic labs use. They're slightly more expensive and usually need your vet to submit them, but if you want the most clinically reliable result, that route is cleaner. For a healthy cat in a precautionary context, Basepaws is a perfectly reasonable choice. If the result concerns you at all, your vet can always order the confirmatory lab test afterwards.

Of course — it's a good test for what it is, just worth knowing where the limits are. You're in a good position: healthy cat, proactive owner, vet already aware of the concern. Whatever the result says, you'll know what to do next. Good luck with it.