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GET INVOLVED
If you or any members of your club/community are interested in participating in this new and exciting realm of dog behavioral genetics research, find out more here.
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THANK YOU
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this project.
We appreciate your support and interest in the study.
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MALE LINEAGE
The Y chromosome, found only in a single copy in males, can be used to track the lineage of male dogs. In humans, it has been used to follow the migrations of populations (e.g., the Genographic Project sponsored by National Geographic, the work of Cavalli-Sforza and others). In dogs, the Y chromosome can be used for similar purposes, such as determining the degree of genetic relatedness between and within breeds. Given the common use of a popular sire in canine breeding, we wanted to determine the degree of genetic diversity of the male chromosome across breeds. For example, it is possible to determine if some, most, or all males representative of a breed are direct descendants of a single or limited group of males. Analysis of mixed dogs would give us the opportunity to predict the breed of male parentage.
Project Goal:
Our goal is to genotype >20 males from each breed in a diverse set of breeds for a number of markers on the Y chromosome. We plan to genotype mixed-breed male dogs for which parent breed is known or unknown in order to test whether Y chromosome patterns can predict breed.
We have genotyped ~75 dogs from 8 breeds, as well as ~35 mixed-breed dogs. We find that males from about half the breeds we looked at all shared the same set of marker genotypes (a "haplotype") only within a breed, while the other breeds each had 2-4 haplotypes among the males within that breed. Interestingly, the breeds did not tend to share haplotypes across breeds (see the attached figure for the network of haplotypes, with each color representing a breed).
EXAMPLE OF HAPLOTYPE CHART
(Need Acrobat Reader to open Haplotype Chart)
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