A week ago the Royal Kennel Club (RKC) published their report ‘A New Future for Dog Breeding‘ that details the ways in which the RKC is going to support pedigree dog breeding to safeguard the future of pedigree dogs. The report is detailed and comprehensive and has been widely welcomed by many stakeholders from the world of dogs.
One topic that is addressed in the report is that of popular sires with the report acknowledging that popular sires are a major concern to many breeders as well as the external experts that contributed to the report. The impact of a popular sire varies between breeds, depending on the number of litters they sire, how many of their offspring are bred from, and the background genetic diversity of the breed breed.
The Canine Genetics Centre team have always been concerned about popular sires, from a health perspective. Every dog carries a number of deleterious mutations, which lead to disease if they are inherited as a double copy. This is an indisputable fact of nature. Popular sires have the potential to spread their ‘personal’ disease mutations widely within their breed, and the CGC has seen multiple examples of this over the many years that they have been investigating inherited diseases in dogs. We have concrete examples of some popular sires passing disease mutations onto many hundreds of offspring, the result being extremely high mutation frequencies, an effect that is exacerbated for late onset diseases.
With the increasingly affordable and accessible technique of whole genome sequencing, the Canine Genetics Centre can identify disease mutations with increasing ease But only if they have access to DNA from affected dogs and their close relatives, and ideally their parents and grandparents. We have experienced the frustration when a new, emerging inherited disease becomes known, only to find that key ancestors in the pedigree are no longer alive, or that DNA from them is unavailable.
For this reason, the CGC is developing a scheme to bank DNA from popular sires, or in fact any dog that has been bred from, the rationale being that the DNA would be available for whole genome sequencing in the future, should it be necessary.
The CGC already stores buccal swabs from thousands of dogs every year, a resource that has enabled us to identify over 35 disease mutations in well over 50 different breeds. But our popular sire banking scheme would offer additional benefits. The CGC team would extract DNA from the swabs, as soon as they arrived, and confirm that there was enough DNA, of sufficient quality, to enable us to sequence the entire genome of that dog in the future, should it be needed. If we could not extract sufficient DNA, we would immediately collect additional swabs, and re-extract. In addition, we be able to offer DNA testing at a reduced cost, either immediately, or in the future, for all DNA tests provided by Canine Genetic Testing.
The definition of a popular sire will vary between breeds, but we hope that this idea will be well received by stakeholders and envisage Breed Clubs welcoming the opportunity to contribute towards the cost of the scheme, as an investment in the future of the health of their breed.
Please email us with your thoughts on this idea – we will be extremely interested to hear them.
