Skip to main content

Owning a dog is influenced by our genetic make-up !!

A team of Swedish and British scientists have studied the heritability of dog ownership using information from 35,035 twin pairs from the Swedish Twin Registry. The new study suggests that genetic variation explains more than half of the variation in dog ownership, implying that the choice of getting a dog is heavily influenced by an individual's genetic make-up.
Dogs were the first domesticated animal and have had a close relationship with humans for at least 15,000 years. Today, dogs are common pets in our society and are considered to increase the well-being and health of their owners. The team compared the genetic make-up of twins (using the Swedish Twin Registry -- the largest of its kind in the world) with dog ownership. The results are published for the first time in Scientific Reports. The goal was to determine whether dog ownership has a heritable component.
"We were surprised to see that a person's genetic make-up appears to be a significant influence in whether they own a dog. As such, these findings have major implications in several different fields related to understanding dog-human interaction throughout history and in modern times. Although dogs and other pets are common household members across the globe, little is known how they impact our daily life and health. Perhaps some people have a higher innate propensity to care for a pet than others." says Tove Fall, lead author of the study, and Professor in Molecular Epidemiology at the Department of Medical Sciences and the Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University.
Carri Westgarth, Lecturer in Human-Animal interaction at the University of Liverpool and co-author of the study, adds: "These findings are important as they suggest that supposed health benefits of owning a dog reported in some studies may be partly explained by different genetics of the people studied."
Studying twins is a well-known method for disentangling the influences of environment and genes on our biology and behaviour. Because identical twins share their entire genome, and non-identical twins on average share only half of the genetic variation, comparisons of the within-pair concordance of dog ownership between groups can reveal whether genetics play a role in owning a dog. The researchers found concordance rates of dog ownership to be much larger in identical twins than in non-identical ones -- supporting the view that genetics indeed plays a major role in the choice of owning a dog.
"These kind of twin studies cannot tell us exactly which genes are involved, but at least demonstrate for the first time that genetics and environment play about equal roles in determining dog ownership. The next obvious step is to try to identify which genetic variants affect this choice and how they relate to personality traits and other factors such as allergy" says Patrik Magnusson, senior author of the study and Associate Professor in Epidemiology at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Insitutet, Sweden and Head of the Swedish Twin Registry.
"The study has major implications for understanding the deep and enigmatic history of dog domestication" says zooarchaeologist and co-author of the study Keith Dobney, Chair of Human Palaeoecology in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. "Decades of archaeological research have helped us construct a better picture of where and when dogs entered into the human world, but modern and ancient genetic data are now allowing us to directly explore why and how?"
Article Source:
Materials provided by Uppsala University. Note: Content may be edited.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Size matters: New data reveals cell size sparks genome awakening in embryos

Transitions are a hallmark of life. When dormant plants flower in the spring or when a young adult strikes out on their own, there is a shift in control. Similarly, there is a transition during early development when an embryo undergoes biochemical changes, switching from being controlled by maternal molecules to being governed by its own genome. For the first time, a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found in an embryo that activation of its genome does not happen all at once, instead it follows a specific pattern controlled primarily by the various sizes of its cells. The researchers published their results this week as the cover story in  Developmental Cell . In an early embryo undergoing cell division, maternally loaded RNA and proteins regulate the cell cycle. The genomes of the zygote -- a term for the fertilized egg -- are initially in sleep mode. However, at a point in the early life of the embryo, these zygotic nuclei "wake...
Post a Comment
Read more

Home births as safe as hospital births: International study suggests

A large international study led by McMaster University shows that low risk pregnant women who intend to give birth at home have no increased chance of the baby's perinatal or neonatal death compared to other low risk women who intend to give birth in a hospital. The results have been published by  The Lancet 's  EClinicalMedicine  journal. "More women in well-resourced countries are choosing birth at home, but concerns have persisted about their safety," said Eileen Hutton, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at McMaster, founding director of the McMaster Midwifery Research Centre and first author of the paper. "This research clearly demonstrates the risk is no different when the birth is intended to be at home or in hospital." The study examined the safety of place of birth by reporting on the risk of death at the time of birth or within the first four weeks, and found no clinically important or statistically different risk between home...
Post a Comment
Read more

Molecular adlayer produced by dissolving water-insoluble nanographene in water

Molecular adlayer produced by dissolving water-insoluble nanographene in water : "Nanographene incorporated micelle capsules" can be prepared by simply pulverizing and mixing nanographene with amphiphilic V-shaped anthracene molecules in water at room temperature. Even though nanographene is insoluble in water and organic solvents, Kumamoto University (KU) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) researchers have found a way to dissolve it in water. Using "molecular containers" that encapsulate water-insoluble molecules, the researchers developed a formation procedure for a nanographene adlayer, a layer that chemically interacts with the underlying substance, by just mixing the molecular containers and nanographene together in water. The method is expected to be useful for the fabrication and analysis of next-generation functional nanomaterials. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in sheet form. It is lighter than metal wit...
Post a Comment
Read more