pet connection

It’s not often the phrase “Scottish deerhound” turns up in the news, let alone in the New York Times. Since deerhounds are my life (that’s my deerhound, Rebel, in the photo with a diminutive friend), I couldn’t resist blogging this:

In a study to be published today in the journal Science, researchers analyzed 3,241 purebreds from 143 breeds. Genetically, the yapper arguing with your ankle is almost identical to the drooling behemoth bred to hunt bears, except for a tiny bit of DNA — universally present in small breeds and largely absent in big ones — that suppresses the “insulin-like growth factor 1” gene.

Dog owners have unwittingly been selecting for it since the last ice age. Dogs emerged from the wolf about 15,000 years ago, and as far back as 10,000 years ago domesticated dogs as big as mastiffs and as small as Jack Russells were trotting the earth.

The study’s lead author, Elaine A. Ostrander, chief of cancer genetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute, said she had visited a lot of dog shows, asking for blood.

“It became kind of a status symbol to participate, and we were inundated,” Dr. Ostrander said. “I only wanted one sample from any descendant of one grandfather, and owners would show up with five Scottish deerhounds, all of them siblings, and say, ‘Oh, absolutely, they all want to be in.’ ”

Making it “cool biology,” she said, is that the same gene suppressor is found in both mice and men, creating mini-mice and suspected in human dwarfism.

Full story here… if you can’t get into the Times, you can find other mentions of the research here and here. No deerhounds in those stories though. Hmmmph.