(p. 2) Every dog has its day, and July 14, 2004, belonged to a boxer named Tasha. On that date, the National Institutes of Health announced that the barrel-chested, generously jowled canine had become the first dog to have her complete genome sequenced. “And everything has kind of exploded since then,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute, who was part of the research team.
. . .
In the 2000s, scientists identified the genetic underpinnings of a variety of canine traits, including curly coats and bobbed tails. They pinpointed mutations that could explain why white boxers were prone to deafness. And they found that corgis, basset hounds and dachshunds owed their stubby legs to a genetic aberration in a family of genes that also regulates bone development in humans.
These early studies “highlighted both the potential that we could learn from dogs, but also that we were going to need bigger sample sizes to do it really well,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute. And so, researchers began creating large citizen science projects, seeking DNA samples and data from dogs across the United States.
Pet owners rose to the challenge. The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, which began recruiting in 2012, has been following more than 3,000 dogs in an effort to identify genetic and environmental risk factors for cancer, which is especially common in the breed. Since 2019, the Dog Aging Project, a long-term study of health and longevity, has enrolled nearly 50,000 dogs.
Dr. Karlsson’s own project, Darwin’s Dogs, is at 44,000 canines and counting. (Some 4,000 have had their genomes sequenced.) Researchers are mining the data for clues about bone cancer, compulsive behavior and other traits.
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(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “How Science Went to the Dogs (and Cats).”)