Monday, November 17, 2014

Deeper Digging Needed to Decode a Best Friend’s Genetic Roots

This article explains new research and explanations to the origin of dogs. Cosmologists settled on the idea that about 13.7 billion years ago the universe was created with a big bang. With dogs, the idea is that dogs originated from wolves. It appears that dogs first evolved between 15,000-100,000 years ago in Asia, Africa or multiple locations. Greger Larson at the University of Durham in England, explains the confusion of the origin of dogs through his on going research. Larson argues that the DNA of modern dogs is so mixed up, its difficult to even monitor the origin of dogs a hundred years old. The only way to understand the origin is through the sequencing of ancient dog fossils.

After analyzing 49,024 locations of dog DNA single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), Larson and his colleagues took the DNA from 1,375 dogs of 121 breeds, and 19 wolves. They discovered that six breeds were less genetically mixed. These six breed include the basenji, shar-pei, Saluki, Akita, Finnish spitz and Eurasier. They also found that dogs more genetically mixed were not from places where the ancient fossils have been found.

basenji

Saluki

 Eurasier

In the Origin Of Domestic Dogs, the University of Turku in Finland analyzed mitochondrail DNA from 18 fossils and compared ancient sequences to those from 49 modern wolves and 77 modern dogs. This new data pinpointed Europe as the major nexus of dog domestication. It identified four clades of modern dogs that are most closely related to ancient European dogs rather than wolves from China or the middle east. The largest clade of domestic dogs last shared a common ancestor 18,800 years ago and shared a common ancestor with wolves around 32,100 years ago. They must have domesticated somewhere in between this window.

In one year from the article of "Deeper Digging Needed to Decode a Best Friend's Genetic Roots" and the "Origin of Domestic Dogs," they have been able to narrow the origin of the domestication of dogs. The ancient dog fossils were key to understanding the origins of dogs.


Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/science/dogs-genetic-roots-remain-obscure.html?_r=1&



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