Giz/Emma and everyones pets on the board

In addition to being a dog nut, I'm a science geek. I work as a molecular biologist in a genetics research lab looking for genetic mutations that cause neurodegenerative disease. I went to a talk on dog genetics given by a friend/colleague of mine who is also a dog nut. I'm sure you've heard the ads(23 and me) offering to give you an analysis of your genetic makeup with a simple cheek swab. The results will often tell you about your heritage, i.e. you are 20% German, 30% Irish...etc. Well you can do the same thing with dogs, and actually the analysis is more precise as dogs genetic makeup is way less diverse than humans because the dog/wolf split when humans domesticated wolves around 15,000 years ago was a pretty small bottleneck, meaning the total number of wolf domestication events was likely very small, probably in the 100's to 1000's. It was previously thought that humans domesticated wolves around the time when humans developed agriculture as a way to gain a partner to help on the farm. Recent data indicates that the domestication of wolves was actually much earlier, way before humans used agriculture, likely as a way to gain a hunting partner. Anyway my friend presented some interesting new research involving the genetic analysis of different dog breeds and how they are related to one another.

Groups of related breeds (clades), are color coded, and each clade is positioned near other clades that they are most closely related to. For example, the Hounds clade, at about 9 o'clock and colored maroon includes: Dachshund, PBGV, Basset, Redbone, Beagle, Foxhound, Otterhound, and Bloodhound. Within that clade the Bloodhound and Otterhound are closely related as you can see a line connecting the two by a common ancestor and those two as a group are closely related to the Foxhound...etc...etc. You can also see that the Hound clade is closely related to the Spaniel clade...etc. The research is far from complete and this data is not meant to be interpreted as concrete or completely correct, more of a general idea.

Most of the relationships are not too surprising. A couple that I found interesting:

The Great Dane/Rhodesian Ridgeback clade at about 4'oclock

The Greman Shepard Dog clade at about 10'oclock

The Basenji appears to be in a clade all by itself

Anyway I found it interesting, and if you ever wanted to know what other breeds your dog is most closely related to, now you can have a better idea. And in the way of full disclosure if you wanted to read the article the data comes from you can find it here.

http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(17)30456-4.pdf

 

Wore that boy out

 

What's up , did she get into the booz er somethin ?

 

It was an interesting graphic. I found the Rat terriers at the 11:30 o'clock spot at the far edge of the Terriers clade. Next to the Maltese and Brichon Frise and then poodles.

 

Rat Terriers are grouped in a clade with Toy Fox, American Hairless, Chinese Crested and Chihuahua. This is a separate clade than the large clade of Terriers, interesting. If you follow the lineage lines back you will find that the Rat Terrier clade shares a common lineage point where the two clades separate indicating that the two clades are relatively closely related. However to find a common point with the clade that the Maltese is in you must follow the lineage lines back through two other intersections indicating that the Maltese clade is less related to the Terrier clade. This is my rudimentary reading of how the cladogram works, I could be mistaken though.

Generating the cladogram is some pretty heavy duty science that involves analyzing hundreds of thousands of data points for each breed and multiple dogs in each breed, using some pretty sophisticated algorithms to compare and contrast as relationships between breeds are formed. The total data set represents 1350 dogs with ~ 160,000 data points for each dog, so around 220 million individual data points. I'm not a computational biologist, so I don't really understand exactly how it all works. The analysis is far from perfect and limited to the data set on hand, as more breeds and more individuals from the breeds are analyzed the data and the relationships become stronger. If you notice the yellow suns, black starbursts, and white stars placed on the cladogram, these are an indication of the confidence level of the relationships defined within the cladogram. Most are yellow suns, indicating a high degree of confidence so the cladogram overall should be pretty accurate.

 

Thanks for giving me some pointers on reading the cladogram. I wasn't looking at it right. It reminds me of a genealogy family tree circle chart. From our dogs behaviour, you can see the traits of the Chihuahua and Jack Terrier. campinspecter always thought that Rascal had a bit of Basenji in him as he would "sing" when he played hard. The breeder we got two of the dogs from also had Manchester Terriers. She got an accidental mixed litter from the Manchester and the Rat terrier so we called them Ratchesters. Looked just like a pure Manchester. She was an honest breeder so she sold them as a mixed breed. They were quite popular.

 

That's the fun part if you have a mixed breed, finding out what's really in em.

 

I am officially placing my order for snuggle time with new puppers..

I will give a full report of snuggleworthiness.

 

Floyd she's mine.

He is snoring logs.