Hidden details of world ’s most famous sled dog revealed in massive genomics project

In 1925, a sled dog named Balto made headlines around the world when he braved fierce winds, a raging blizzard, and splintering river ice to bring lifesaving serum to an isolated Alaskan town struck with diphtheria. (Although another sled dog, Togo, may deserve most of the credit .) Now, researchers have pieced together a fuller picture of the celebrated canine from DNA taken from the underbelly of his stuffed, faded carcass. Aided by hundreds of newly sequenced genomes and an extensive database of dog DNA, they were able to glean details about Balto’s size, appearance, and stamina not captured in historical photos of the famed canine. “Even with the genome of a single individual, you can learn a lot,” says Nathan Upham, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University who was not involved with the research. The work, reported today in Science with 10 other papers about a massive sequencing effort called Zoonomia, speaks to the power of having many accurately sequenced genomes on file , says Greger Larson, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Oxford who also was not involved in the research. He says the project will permit scientists to better assess the looks, physiology, and perhaps even the conservation status of species based on single genomes. “The predictive ability is just staggering.” For the Zoonomia project, researchers from around the world obtained and compared complete DNA sequences of 240 ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news