Come! SNP! Stay! Good boy! Do dogs Make the Best Model Org?
The wide intraspecies diversity found among most dogs make that species a good model organism, according to Elaine Ostrander and Francis Galibert, two collaborators in a global canine genomics project who attended last week’s 68th annual Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology.
“Other model organisms are important for understanding the function of genes,” explained Galibert, of the University of Rennes in France. “The dog is important for understanding the function of alleles.”