Dog Cancer (07.06.04) - Researchers at Purdue University have found an association between the risk of bladder cancer in Scottish Terriers and the dogs' exposure to lawns treated with herbicides.
Look Like Your Dog? (06.11.04) - If you think people choose dogs that look like them, you may be barking up the right tree. This theory now has some science to back it up.
Pedigreed pooches aren't just for show anymore. As this ScienCentral News video reports, biomedical researchers say dog genealogy is making a new contribution to human health.
Dog Days
Sometimes it's hard to believe that the tiny Chihuahua and the bulky Mastiff are members of the same species. But there's more to dog's differences than meets the eye. Now genetics researchers can identify a dog's breed through its DNA. This genetics-based classification system for breeds will allow researchers to piece together the evolutionary history of our furry pals, as well as study their genes for information about diseases that we also get.
"The different breeds of dogs have very different physical appearances, very different sizes, and very different behavior patterns," says Elaine Ostrander, professor of genome sciences and zoology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who published the research in the journal Science. "So if you think about very small breeds of dogs, like the Pekinese, if you think about very large breeds of dogs, like the Great Dane…there is an amazing amount of genetics that must account for those differences between those very large dogs and between those very small dogs. And we were interested in finding some of the genes that were responsible for differences in appearance in size, in shape or morphology, as well as behavior between different dogs."
Dog DNA is collected with a swab.
Ostrander and her team sampled cheek cells from 414 different dogs from 85 different dog breeds, and found that each breed had a distinct genetic signature that could be used to match 99 percent of the dogs with their correct breed. The researchers used their data to construct an evolutionary tree showing which breeds were most closely related. The tree included one ancient group and three relatively recent ones. The oldest group includes dogs from Asia— like the chow, and from Africa— like the basenji. These dogs are also the most genetically similar to wolves. The breeds outside this group didn't show up until the around the 1800s. The dogs in these three groups correspond to the type of work they were bred for— the border collie, from the herding group, is known for its agility, stamina, tenacity, and intelligence— and many share behavioral traits as well as physical ones.
"The genome sequence of the dog and the genome sequence of humans differs by less than one or two percent," Ostrander points out. "This really looks like it's going to work. It's really going to be true— the genes that we are going to find in dogs are really going to be important for human health and biology."
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