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.
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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.
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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
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The dog genome project began in June 2003 with about $30 million in financial backing by the NHGRI.