WP,pg1: In Dog Genome, Scientists See Man's Best Hope

In Dog Genome, Scientists See Man's Best Hope
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 8, 2005; Page A01


....The biological basis of the astonishing variety of behaviors of man's best friend is a big step closer to comprehension today with the publication of the dog's genome -- its 2.41 billion nucleotides, or DNA "letters."

The dog -- in the form of a female boxer named Tasha -- joins the human, the chimpanzee, the mouse and the rat on the list of mammals whose genetic instruction manual has been transcribed. The genomes of the fruit fly, a microscopic worm, yeast and several bacteria have also been decoded.

But the dog genome is far more than a curiosity. It is already providing insights into evolution and will probably make dogs the chief tool for understanding the genetic diseases of people....

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Eric S. Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., where the research was done, said: "The genetic structure of dog breeds is so much clearer than in the human population that it will make genetic analysis much simpler."

The work is the product of nearly 250 scientists organized through the institute, which is affiliated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A much less detailed version of the dog genome by a different research group was published two years ago....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/07/AR2005120702457.html

Dog DNA is already teaching several lessons about human DNA. For one thing, comparisons between DNA of dogs, humans and mice revealed elaborate controls on the activity of certain human genes active in early development, Lander said.

The three-way comparisons also showed that some genetic features found in humans but not mice aren't really unique to people, but also appear in dogs, he said. "The more species we look at, the more, frankly, we find that humans are not exceptional here," Lander said.

Researchers also estimated that dogs have 19,300 genes, almost all of them canine versions of genes found in people. Prior studies have indicated that people have about 3,000 more, but Lander said the dog analysis "is leading us to question whether those are in fact real human genes." Some proposed human genes, he said, are now "suspect" and may not be genes at all.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051208/ap_on_sc/doggie_dna;_ylt=A9G_RxYdsJdDU5oAvhRvieAA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

:-)