The canine era: the rise of a biomedical model.
Since the annotation of its genome a decade ago, the dog has proven to be an excellent model for the study of inherited diseases. A large variety of spontaneous simple and complex phenotypes occur in dogs, providing physiologically relevant models to corresponding human conditions. In addition, gene discovery is facilitated in clinically less heterogeneous purebred dogs with closed population structures because smaller study cohorts and fewer markers are often sufficient to expose causal variants. Here, we review the development of genomic resources from microsatellites to whole-genome sequencing and give examples of successful findings that have followed the technological progress. The increasing amount of whole-genome sequence data warrants better functional annotation of the canine genome to more effectively utilise this unique model to understand genetic contributions in morphological, behavioural and other complex traits.
Department of Clinical Sciences of Companion Animals, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Yalelaan 104, 3508 TD, Utrecht, the Netherlands. f.g.vansteenbeek@uu.nl.
F G
FG
van Steenbeek
Research Programs Unit, Molecular Neurology, Department of Veterinary Biosciences 00014, Folkhälsan Research Center, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
M K
MK
Hytönen
Department of Clinical Sciences of Companion Animals, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Yalelaan 104, 3508 TD, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
P A J
PA
Leegwater
Research Programs Unit, Molecular Neurology, Department of Veterinary Biosciences 00014, Folkhälsan Research Center, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
H
H
Lohi
D000818:Animals; D001947:Breeding; D002874:Chromosome Mapping; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D004285:Dogs / Q000235:genetics*; D059472:Exome; D016678:Genome; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D010641:Phenotype; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
animal model; dog; genetic tools; next generation sequencing