Tag: DNA

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Really! There is Genetic Difference Between Those Who Own Dog and Those Who Don’t

Identical twins display much higher rates of agreement in the area of dog ownership compared to non-identical twins.

London, May 17, 2019: A surprising new study shows light on the difference in genetic blueprint explains more than 50% of the variation between those who choose to own dogs and those who don’t.

While dogs, being the earliest domesticated animals, are thought to have been part of the human household for 15,000 years, not all humans own them. The reason for this difference is explained to a very large extent by heritable factors, namely, the DNA make-up of the individual.

The current Swedish-British study exploited the largest data registry on twins in the world, i.e. the Swedish Twin Registry, to tease out the differing influences of environment and genetics on dog ownership. Twin studies are particularly suited for this type of research, since identical twins have exactly the same DNA while non-identical twins share about half their genetic make-up.

In this study, the researchers looked at over 35,000 pairs of twins. They first examined the concordance of dog ownership between the two members of each twin pair, and then classified this based on whether the twins were identical or not.

They found that identical twins display much higher rates of agreement in the area of dog ownership compared to non-identical twins. This led them to conclude that the human behavior of choosing to own a dog is largely dictated by one’s genes.

Lead author Tove Fall says the study findings could help understand many facets of how and why dogs and humans have had such a long history of association.

Many older studies have reported on the benefits of having a dog, such as an improved sense of well-being and better health. With the current research, the reasons for such benefits appear, in part at least, to depend on the genetics of the individual, as co-author Carl Westgarth points out.

The question as to which genes are related to dog ownership is now open, and will be the focus of future studies. In addition, researchers will try to work out how these genes are linked to other personality traits, and to factors that also determine the choice of owning a dog, like allergy

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DNA Gives Insight into Prehistoric Bonds Between Dogs and Humans

Research Suggests man’s best friend may have originated from just two populations of wolves.

London, April 24, 2019: The domestication of animals is regarded as one of the seminal developments in human history. It saw wild animals at first live in closer proximity to humans and then gradually evolve new traits that became beneficial to our species.

The process has given us readily available sources of protein, milk and fat. It has provided animals that can help us work the land, guard our property or enable us to travel faster than we can on foot. They have also offered us valuable companionship.

But exactly how, where and when our ancestors domesticated many of the pets and livestock we have around us today is still largely a mystery. Researchers on the UnDEAD project, however, are attempting to unravel this using DNA obtained from the remains of wild and domesticated animals that lived thousands of years ago.
By comparing these to the DNA from modern domestic animals like dogs, chickens and pigs, they are starting to build up a picture of where these animals came from.

‘These three animals can tell us a lot about the beginning of domestication and the changing association they had with people,’ said Professor Greger Larson, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Oxford in the UK and coordinator of the UnDEAD project.

Larson said dogs were the first animals to be domesticated, chickens were the earliest birds that we have evidence of domestication for and pigs were some of the earliest farm animals to be domesticated.

Research has produced some surprising findings. Dogs, for example, were thought to have been domesticated from wolves just once around 15,000 years ago. But research by the UnDEAD project on genetic material obtained from 59 ancient dogs and a dog from the Bronze Age in Ireland around 4,800 years ago has shown that dogs may have been domesticated on more than one occasion.
By combining the genetic analysis with archaeological evidence of domestic dogs from around the world, their findings suggest that wolves were domesticated independently from two separate populations in Eastern and Western Asia. The animals then spread with humans into Europe and Asia.

(Story by Horizon)

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