And to know its genetic make-up, you need to know how to detect the genetic coding errors that cause a disease to develop. Several years ago they found the gene responsible for a form of the disease that occurs only in Irish setters. And genetic tests are becoming common for some other single gene-inherited diseases, among them hyperkalemic period paralysis, which can devastate Quarter horses. Unlike these examples of simple recessive traits, hip dysplasia poses a particular challenge to genetics researchers because it is a polygenic disease, one that is caused by the interplay of multiple gene defects. His unusual breeding studies, in collaboration with George Lust, PhD, professor of physiological chemistry at Baker Institute, involve more than 215 dogs, allowing him to begin separating out the various mutations that are always present in dogs with the disease.
Genomics is a set of tools for unraveling and understanding the blueprints of life.
For years, biology was a sort of cottage industry where a person worked individually and generated a reasonable amount of data. Now you can set a sequencer to run overnight and obtain data that previously would have taken an entire lifetime to generate. The structure of the canine parvovirus. The enormous volume of data is one of the reasons a new approach to the discipline is needed. The numbers of participating scientists and the breadth of the work conducted will make it the most ambitious research project ever carried out at Cornell.