Strawberry roan, or chestnut roan, is a horse coat color consisting of a mixture of reddish-brown and white hairs in varying proportions, stable over the long term, with the head and lower limbs remaining darker than the rest of the body. Because of the wide variety of possible shades and seasonal variations, the horse coat has given rise to an abundance of poetic terminology, often inspired by the lexical field of botany, in both English and French.
Before the possibility of genetic recognition, the strawberry roan coat was described solely on the basis of the phenotype of the horses concerned. Its genetic function was hypothesized as early as the 1910s, with the identification of a Roan factor. Genetically, this coat color results from epistasis, the action of at least one copy of an allele of the Roan gene (Rn) on a chestnut base coat. The mutation responsible for all Roan coats, identified in 1999, is located on the KIT gene.
This coat color is mentioned in two horses imported to the American continent by Hernán Cortés, as well as in various works and traditional songs. It can occur in all breeds of horse likely to express Roan on a chestnut base coat, such as Dartmoor, Breton, Belgian, Quarter Horse and Criollo.