NEW YORK, July 14 (GenomeWeb News) - A group of research centers supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute has made freely available the first draft of the dog genome sequence, the NHGRI said yesterday.
The genome of Canis familiaris was assembled by a team led by Kerstin Lindblad-Toh of the Broad Institute (an MIT/Harvard institute) and Agencourt Bioscience. The genome contains approximately 2.5 billion DNA base pairs - similar in size to the human genome. The sequence is that of a boxer, so chosen after analyses of 60 breeds revealed that it was one of the breeds with the least amount of genetic variation.
Data from the seven-fold sequence coverage have been deposited in GenBank, and will be distributed to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database and the DNA Data Bank of
The dog genome project began in June 2003 with about $30 million in financial backing by the NHGRI.