The CGC Idiopathic Epilepsy (IE) project is progressing well. We are still collecting samples from affected dogs of any age and unaffected dogs aged 8 or older across the five breeds: Beagles, English Springer Spaniels, Giant Schnauzers, Hungarian Vizslas, and Irish Setters. The IE team is now collating and extracting DNA from around 250 new samples submitted since the project’s launch. The graph shows samples received and kit requests still awaiting return—the target is 200 per breed.
For any affected dogs submitted to us, it’s really helpful to have as much information about their seizures as possible. If you’ve sent a swab from an affected dog and we’ve requested further details, please keep us updated if you can. If you’ve received one of our swab kits but haven’t yet returned it, please swab your dog and send it back as soon as possible, as we will be finalising sample collections in summer for the next phase of the project.
Epilepsy project timeline
The first phase of the project, involving whole genome sequencing of five cases and five unaffected dogs from each breed, is complete, and the data are being assimilated into a database for computational analysis over the coming months. In the summer, once we have enough samples, we will begin validation testing of the candidate risk variants identified from our whole genome sequencing analysis in breed-specific case-control sets.
