Well the story has resurfaced again….

In Dresden, Germany, a citizen commission overwhelmingly recommended a plan where DNA samples would be collected from all dogs when their owners renew their annual canine license. It is projected that within one year, a database of Dresden’s currently registered 12,500 canines would be complete. At that point sanitation workers would begin carrying feces-sample kits and submit evidence to a forensics laboratory, where scientists could easily match the feces to dog. The dog’s owner would be promptly fined up to (the equivalent of) $600 US dollars. Dresden’s commission projects a break-even point after about seven months at which point the city would start to turn a profit.

While in the past I have seen this story surface as a joke it seems that the idea of creating a DNA database to fine errant dog owners seems to be picking up steam and gaining more wide spread support. In the mean time I am going to keep my eyes posted to see how this story unfolds.

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In an unusual case that spanned nearly a year, DNA sample were taken to prove that Molly belonged to Cliff and Darlene Ryckman.

Molly had no microchip and no tattoo, so when the tiny dog went missing last year the Ryckmans were at a loss to prove the identity of the dog they had raised from birth.  Even though they found out who in the neighborhood had taken her in.

Darlene, said “I thought you know what, they do it on humans, they got to do it on animals,” when asked where shy got the idea to preform a DNA test on Molly.

The Ryckmans also own Molly’s sire, Howey, and had the DNA paternity test done to compare genetic material between the two. In all three test were performed on each dog.

The stressful year started last March 4 when the two dogs were let out into the back yard of the family’s home.  The gate wasn’t quite shut, and the two dogs started to chase a cat and the next thing Darlene knew, she couldn’t find Molly.

“I prayed every day,” she said. “I went to a psychic. I put it in The Spectator.”  Darlene also put an announcement on local TV, got the word out at some schools and put up flyers.

Almost right after Molly went missing, a woman responded to the flyers Darlene had posted.  She said had seen two people in the neighborhood pick up a Shih Tzu and take it into an apartment building.  Cliff, tracked down a specific apartment, and was told by a woman there that they did not have Molly.

The Ryckmans weren’t convinced and they were persistent with police.  Eventually they ended up face-to-face with the people who had picked up Molly on the street when they were out with Molly.  Darlene said of the encounter, “Seeing Molly just walking away from me … she was going nuts when she seen me and my husband, and I just broke down because I couldn’t take my dog and these people wouldn’t give me my dog back.”

Cliff said the whole situation was very upsetting for the couple.  He said,”It upset me to go to work because my wife would be crying everyday.”

But finally, after much determination and pursuing Molly through three moves by the people who had Molly, the Ryckmans paid $110 for DNA tests for the two dogs.  Constable Annette Huys, one of two officers working on the case, took the DNA samples.  Huys said, “I’d just come out of the forensic unit, so I was used to collecting lots of DNA, but not necessarily from dogs.”  Huys said unfortunately everybody had fallen in love with the Molly and it didn’t matter which side police dealt with, they were always crying when it came to talking about the Molly.

It took about two weeks for the samples to come back a match. Molly was returned to her the Ryckmans on February 20th.

Staff Sergeant Jack Langhorn called the entire case including taking doggy DNA “extremely unusual.” He said, “It was a unique situation … It wouldn’t be something that we’re going to do on a regular basis.”

Darlene said she’s grateful to the two officers who worked on the case and that, she’ll be getting Molly microchiped shortly.

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Muscle growth is governed by myostatin, a protein that determines whether an animal has compact muscles tuned for rapid sprints or a leaner body suited for endurance. There are three possible combination at this specific genetic marker. This test is not designed to identify how good a horse is likely to be, but rather what it will be good at.

According to Equinome, the three genetic combination that are possible are C:C, C:T and T:T. A C:C horse is likely to be a fast, early maturing horse that performs well as a two-year-old, while a C:T horse has a mixture of speed and stamina and is the most versatile in terms of distance, and a T:T horse is best suited to races greater than 1 mile that require stamina.

Horse Genome Project coordinator Ernest Bailey of the University of Kentucky, Lexington stated that breeders have adopted genetic tests for paternity, coat color, and diseases but that performance prediction is new ground.

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This canine mystery solver is quickly becoming a popular within the dog community and in the media. Both ABC and NBC, as well as other mainstream media, bloggers and animal lovers with websites, have run stories on breed testing over the last few years.

NBC’s story ran 10/20/06 When Today’s hostess Meredith tested her own dog using the Canine Heritage™ XL Breed Test. This test uses cheek swabs.

ABC’s story ran 5/20/2007 they tested Becky and Alex Shelton’s dog Sol using a blood test. This is a test that needs to be preformed at a Veterinarian’s office. Vets do charge fees for drawing the blood sample that would be in addition to the testing fees.

Both tests were very informative and it appears the breeds that made up these two dogs were identifiable. There are some times were this is not the case. For example many labs don’t test for “Pit Bull” and any dogs that include this breed would show as unidentified breed or something similar, or just not show up at all.

It is important to do your research on which ever type of testing you decide to move froward with. Most labs will have email addresses or phone numbers where you can verify which breeds are tested.

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New Insight Into Horse Evolution Friday, December 11, 2009 18:35 IST

Scientists at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA (ACAD) based at the University of Adelaide are studying ancient DNA from extinct horse species have discovered new evidence on the evolution of Equidae over the past 55 million years.

Only the modern horse, zebras, wild asses and donkey survive today, but many other lineages have become extinct over the last 50,000 years.

“Our results change both the basic picture of recent equid evolution, and ideas about the number and nature of extinct species,” Cooper said.  The study used bones from caves to identify new horse species in Eurasia and South America, and reveal that the Cape zebra, an extinct giant species from South Africa, were simply large variants of the modern Plains zebra.

Study’s lead author, Dr Ludovic Orlando, from the University of Lyon, said that the research team discovered a new species of the distinct, small hippidion horse in South America.  “Previous fossil records suggested this group was part of an ancient lineage from North America but the DNA showed these unusual forms were part of the modern radiation of equid species,” Orlando said.

“This has serious implications for biodiversity and the future impacts of climate change,” Cooper added

This study does not appear to have immediate consequences it continues to add to our knowledge of the world on which we live.  The bones that were studied come from different time periods and many show that these animals became extinct more recently than previously though some as recently as 50,000 years ago.  This study also suggest that we have under-estimated how much a single species can vary over time and space, and mistakenly assumed more diversity among extinct species than were possible.  While most children study Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution it is sometimes easy to forget that each species changes over time.

This article provides food for though regarding the environment around us and how it has been changing over time.

The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Dan Vergano, USA TODAY. Scientists have cloned man’s best friend for the first time, creating a genetic duplicate of a 3-year-old male Afghan hound, South Korean scientists reported Wednesday

The puppy was born in April to its surrogate mom, a Labrador retriever. His name: Snuppy, short for Seoul National University puppy. The team of scientists there that cloned the dog, led by Hwang Woo Suk, is the same one that first cloned human embryonic stem cells last year. Their achievement is reported in the journal Nature. Researchers have cloned other animals, but dog cloning has posed a particular challenge. And the difficulties have alarmed some animal advocates and researchers.

There are benefits of cloning your pet according to the Seoul National University, but there are also many groups that are questioning the ethics involved in cloning.

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The new work is reported in the November issue of the journal Genome Research by a team including O’Brien and colleague Joan Pontius. It covers about two-thirds of the DNA of Cinnamon, a research cat that lives at the University of Missouri in Columbia; more complete results are expected next year, O’Brien said.

Richard Gibbs of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who led a team that decoded the DNA of a monkey called the rhesus macaque, called the new work “a good outline” of cat DNA. Scientists are looking forward to the complete version, which will be useful for making detailed comparisons to the DNA of other animals, he said.

The full complement of an organism’s DNA is called its genome. In cats, as in people, it’s made up of nearly 3 billion building blocks. The sequence of those blocks spells out the hereditary information, just as strings of letters spell out sentences. Decoding a genome, which is called sequencing, means identifying the order of the building blocks.

The new work identified 20,285 genes in the cat, probably about 95% of the animal’s full complement, O’Brien said. That’s similar to the 20,000-25,000 genes estimated for humans.

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Biologists at Texas State University announced Thursday night they had identified the hairless doglike creature.

KENS-TV of San Antonio provided a tissue sample from the animal for testing.

“The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote,” biologist Mike Forstner said in a statement. “This is probably the answer a lot of folks thought might be the outcome. I, myself, really thought it was a domestic dog, but the Cuero Chupacabra is a Texas Coyote.”

Phylis Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 90 miles southeast of San Antonio.

Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she could get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

Chupacabra means “goat sucker” in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Additional skin samples have been taken to try to determine the cause of the animal’s hair loss, Forstner said.

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This study was conducted by Genetics professor Greg Barsh, MD, PhD, and one of his graduate students, Tovi Anderson, as well as other scientist collaborators. They compared DNA collected from 41 black, white and gray wolves in the Canadian Arctic and 224 black and gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park with that of domestic dogs and gray and black coyotes. This study confirmed that the black-coat gene shows evidence of positive selection in forest wolves. It also showed that the gene is dominant, meaning that an animal with only one copy of the gene would still have a black coat. Ten out of fourteen pups conceived by the mating between a black wolf and a gray wolf carried the gene and were black.

Anderson and her collaborators used a variety of genetic tests to determine that the mutation was likely introduced into wolves by domesticated dogs sometime in the last 10,000 to 15,000 years. This was about the same time the first Native American humans were migrating across the Bering land bridge. These humans were probably accompanied by dogs, some of which carried the black-coat mutation estimated to have arisen about 50,000 years ago.

Barsh said, “We were really surprised to find that domestic animals can serve as a genetic reservoir that can benefit the natural populations from which they were derived. It’s also fascinating to think that a portion of the first Native American dogs, which are now extinct, may live on in wolves.”

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