 Very Distant Relatives
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Sept. 26, 2003 — Dogs are genetically closer to man than mice, U.S. researchers said Thursday, detailing a partial sequencing of the dog genome.
The researchers at the Institute for Genomic Research and The Center for the Advancement of Genomics assembled 6.22 million sequences of dog DNA for nearly 80 percent coverage of the genome, they said in a statement.
"Comparing the dog sequence data with current drafts of the human and mouse genome sequences showed that the dog lineage was the first to diverge from the common ancestor of the three species," they said in results published in the review Science.
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"The human and dog are much more similar to each other at the genetic level than to the mouse," they said.
The project found that more than 25 percent, or 650 million base pairs, of DNA overlap between human and dog.
"The sequence data was used to identify an equivalent dog gene for 75 percent of known human genes," they added.
"In little more than a decade, genomics has advanced greatly and we now have approximately 150 completed genomes including the human, mouse and fruit fly, in the public domain," said Craig Venter, president of The Center for the Advancement of Genomics.
"Our new method is an efficient and effective way of sequencing that will allow more organisms to be analyzed while still providing significant information."
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