The NHGRI-supported researchers are currently comparing the dog and human genome sequences and plan to publish results of their analysis in the next several months.

The dog genome is similar in size to the genomes of humans and other mammals, containing approximately 2.5 billion DNA base pairs. Due to a long history of selective breeding, many types of dogs are prone to genetic diseases that are difficult to study in humans, such as cancer, heart disease, deafness, blindness and autoimmune disorders. In addition, the dog is an important model for the genetics of behavior and is used extensively in pharmaceutical research.

To best characterize disease in dogs, it is important to have a sufficient number of markers in the genome. Therefore, in addition to the boxer, nine other dog breeds, four wolves and a coyote were sampled to generate markers that can be used in disease studies in any dog breed. A preliminary set of about 600,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which amounts to a SNP roughly every 5,000 DNA base pairs, is currently being aligned to the released assembly. The reads used to identify the SNPs are publicly available in NCBI’s Trace Archive and the SNPs will be available shortly at the Single Nucleotide Polymorphism database,  dbSNP.

Sequencing of the dog genome began in June 2003. NHGRI provided about $30 million in funding for the project to the Broad Institute, which is part of NHGRI’s Large-Scale Sequencing Research Network.