science_doc

Okay, please stop right here: And yes, I freely admit...I suck at molecular genetics. But then have you ever tried to read through topics like Mu DNA, Circularization of Infecting DNA, Mu encoded protiens, Ribosomomal frame shifting, Replicative Transposition, Mechanism of G inversion? and other such topics. Its enough to make your eyes glaze over. For example.... I am still trying to work out as to where TN3, TN7, TN1721 exactly are located (as in are they themselves gene sequencing or only a pritien within the gene?) and what they do, I understand they are some sort of family dealing with protien coding (GCAT)...I realize that they are gram positive transponsons...but understanding their use can make your eyes cross. So I applogize for my ignorance. If any one out there would like to help me understand and figure out some sort of system so that I can remember protien codes I am all for it. Also I would like to know how they decide the difference between a heptanucleotide and a nucleotide, as well as how they catagorize TN families? Is it location? or legth of code? Is it based on the 3' end or the 5' end or am I totally off on either of those assumptions? Or is it based on its positive or nagative charge? Reading books about the results of gene combinations is alot easier then reading books about the molecular aspects of protien sequencing..... Hey...at least ignorance is curable. This is a complete and utter mish mash of non-sensical science words copied and pasted from an old text book...."gram positive" referes to a type of bacteria and has NOTHING to do with genetics. Transposons are hopping pieces of DNA shown to be present in the mamalian genomes only very recently, do you know where they came from, cause I do. What the cr** is a pritien? Did you mean protein....that again is NEVER part of DNA. I would be willing to explain anything you want, but PLEASE speak real words not jibberish.

okay I was on vacation....now that I am back I'm going to read through the entire thread and think and then reply, cause I think that this is an extremely interesting topic, that's all for now. This is so much fun for a science geek you would not believe it!!!!

Perfect marble example Hobbit :wink: Please don't even get me started on cat breeding, worse problems than dogs, LOL!

I never claimed to be an expert on dog breeding in fact just the opposite, I stated that I have never and will never breed dogs. I can however make statements about the detrement of inbreeding on a gene pool. What I have not liked about your responses is that they could give the wrong idea to people who are unfamiliar with genetics. Take for example, Hmmmmm's response that he knows nothing about genetics (these are the authors words) but he thinks that inbreeding is a fantastic idea as long as he can't *see* anything wrong with his dogs. This is a dangerous practice. I understand that many breeders are out to improve their breeds, however there seems to be an awful lots of breeders who don't give a darn. As far as my statement about you being close minded, I make this assement based on your replies to my posts. I think that I could learn lots of cool stuff from you about the genetics of your breed, but your previous posts gave me the impression that you thought doing things the old way is the best way without paying any attention to new ideas. They definately left me with the impression that you think inbreeding over many generations is a good idea, and I will NEVER agree with that, call me closed minded if you like. When I started this post I was just trying to point out the dangers of inbreeding for many generations. Instead of saying "that's true, but here is why inbreeding is good" you started rattling off a bunch ideas that are no longer believed by the majority of science or animal husbandry. So I am glad you have enjoyed this discussion, I have too, I just hope that it doesn't lead to confusion. I was certainly convinced that all your dogs were likely to be highly inbred and now it's obvious to me that is not likely to be the case. I am impressed with the genetic knowledge you do have, especially with no formal training. One more question.....Do you or would you consider outcrossing you dog lines? That was really the point of this post originally and perhaps that is the way I should have started the post. Reading the articles that I posted lead me to believe that not many people are willing to outbreed dogs and this is bad.

Poofy, What is the value in inbreeding? You admitt that there are consequences, why do it at all? How does it improve the genetics of your breeds? Just because you think you can "get away with it" for a few generations phenotypically does not mean you are not doing irreperable harm to your breed genotypically. By the way INBREEDING is BAD BREEDING!

Glory, I posted some links a little further up the thread.....

Poofy as I said before by the way that you play with semantics in your responses you are closed minded...... Did you even read the links I posted? Perhaps other scientists can phrase these things in a way that might open your mind. I was not trying to insult your intelligence, but I was trying to point out that you seem to try and speak with authority about topics which in my eyes you have only a very general and outright incorrect understanding. I am simply trying to prevent the dissemintation of misinformation. I have now given 2 sources besides myself with good reasons to eliminate inbreeding, you have yet to demonstrate one source (other than dog breeders, one cow herd, and some rats) where inbreeding has truly improved the health of animals or people. In case you were wondering, part of my job is to create transgenic animals.....so as I said before I know a bit about breeding programs. You are 100% wrong that outbreeding will not get rid of mutations within the population. When you outbreed you can ELIMINATE the bad allelel from the POPULATION by selective breeding, thereby ELIMINATING the disease. We can breed traits in and out of mice in just a few generations, this is a FACT. I can site peer reviewed liturature from the top science labs in the world. I don't know any other way to phrase that simple statement. This is how natural selection has worked from the begining of time. You try and pretend that mutations take thousands of years to do their damage but that is not true, there are new diseases arising in all species EVERYDAY and most of them are NOT EMBRYONIC LETHAL. Inbreeding will just speed up the rate at which mutations, which as I have said before happen everyday to every creature with DNA (even puppies), and increase the chance of spreading diseases within a population, ESPECIALLY with a CLOSED GENETIC POOL. As for the genetic math that you did not understand, a first cousin marriage has a 7 fold greater chance of bringing together 2 recessive allelels, even when they are as rare as 0.01% in the rest of the population, than a mating between 2 genetically unrelated individuals. The royal families of Europe carried WAY more diseases in their pedigrees than just hemophelia...look it up sometime. I'm sure that the CDC now has record keeping that far surpasses anything the European royalty produced, they are studied because they were so full of mutations and DISEASES! There is an eastern jewish population that carries almost every recessive mutation known in genetics and why.....because they have INBRED for hundreds of years. Your response about muscular dystrophy is pretty good, this can be a sex linked disease in the case of Duchene's muscular dystrophy. This is not the same thing as MS or multiple sclerosis. I was simply trying to point out a disease where one mutation causes a problem with one protein that causes a loss of muscle mass so severe that it results in death. You are correct that in this case because the disease is sex linked it only takes one bad copy for the disease to happen. Howver, inbreeding makes all diseases more common in the population, contiune to inbreed and soon ther won't be any "good" stock to choose from. Are you aware how scientist established genetic disease models in rodents(before the age of molecular cloning, now we can engineer our diseases)? We inbreed them for generation after generation until something went wrong. That literally ment EVERYTHING and ANYTHING. Those mouse lines are still used today as models of human and animal disease. So if we can create diseased rodent lines by inbreeding why can't you see that is what dog breeders are doing right now to the most popular breeds? You said that you will choose your five or six "breed specific" problems. I hate to tell you this, but those problems are going to grow to 500 or 600 if you continue to inbreed. I guess your screening methods don't really allow you to detect genetic problems do they? You suddenly changed the subject to how human medicine hurting human genetics, and that is a point with which I will agree completely. I was in no way comparing human genetics to animal husbandry I was just pointing out that I doubt enough canine genetic research has been done for breeders to screen for many diesease, because we are certainly not there with human medicine where billions are spent every year.

Seems to me that everyone should know the most important thing to do with a resuce from which you want a dog is to do a good job COMMUNICATING. People seem not to understand that the truth will set you free.

Hobbit, The reasoning you give for livestock breeding is the very thought that made me start the thread. I suspect that people must not have a clear understanding of the inherent value of genetic diversity, and I think that perhaps because there are fewer dogs bred than livestock, dog breeders are just a bit behind in learning? This is the only explanation I can think of........there just haven't been enough overwhelming issues, because relatively fewer animals are being bred? For example, beef cattle must be born at a higher rate than great danes? So dog breeders just don't get to see the problems appear as quickly within their lines? Also perhaps as long as a "few" champions are produced, the dog breeders are willing to take their losses with the other "pet" quality animals? Farmers and ranchers should couldn't afford these type of problems in their herds. I don't know any of this as fact, I'm just wondering out loud how something that is taken for granted in the farming and science could be so grossly ignored by the dog breeding community? I can't believe the rules for getting a dog papers would require the genetics of the gene pool closed, complete non-sense.

Thanks K :D For cleaning up the thread. The science geek inside of me is havaing a total blast!

The lack of genetic markers for canine diseases is exactly my point. Breeders claim they are only breeding "healthy" animals, but if there are no genetic screens, there is no way to know for sure. You can wait for a certain age to demonstrate that one specific animal doesn't have a disease phenotypically, but there is no way to know that they are not a carrier of a disease genotypically. In case you all are wondering what put the bee in my bonnet about dog genetics, here is a link to the article I read: [url]http://www.discover.com/apr_03/featscienceof.html[/url] Okay, Discover is not a peer reviewed scientific journal, but even a simpleton like me can understand the physics articles, LOL. I also found this site on a quick web search, but buyer beware, I haven't finished reading the whole site. I just think the first paragraph seems pretty interesting: [url]http://www.magmacom.com/~kaitlin/diverse.html[/url] I just wanted to say that I never ment to offend anyone with these posts.....I felt like this was a chance to combine my job which I have a great deal of knowledge about with my hobbie, where I often feel like a "little dog" amongst the "big dogs". So I guess I do feel emotional about the issue of dog genetics, cause it is so near and dear to my heart.

Poofy you are talking about semantics...........you are absolutely right that inbreeding does not CAUSE disease in the direct sense of the word. The exact same thing can be said about smoking. Smoking itself is not going to kill you outright, however it will greatly increase the mutational rate within lung, throat, and mouth tissue which will greatly increase the likelyhood of developing cancer. A mutation does not need several generations to cause a problem. A mutation in DNA often causes an errant protein which can have an immediate effect within the organism or in their off spring. Just ask someone with muscular dystrophy how long their single mutation took to change their life. You are using words like "molecular" and "anomolie" to make it appear like you have deep scientific understanding of genetics, which it is clear that you do not. When the frequency of a recessive mutation within a population is 0.01% a first cousin mating has a 7 fold chance of producing a homozygous recessive offspring. Basically if the mutation is there inbreeding will bring it out for sure (Primer of Population Genetic, Daniel Hartl). You are using semantics to continue breeding in a manner which is hurting and will continue to hurt dog breeds far into the next century. They are not outbreeding tigers with lions because they are "wild" creatures, but rather because this is the ONLY way to eliminate the "molecular" mutations you mentioned. A genetic bottle neck hurts a wild population for the reasons you mentioned, but the same bottle neck could give rise to many canine diseases that appear to me to be endemic within a majority of the population. I don't think that you fully understand the meaning of "crossing over". This type of mutation, and it is often a HARMFUL mutation (resulting in losses of big chunks of chromosome due to incomplete segregation), while it can create new allelic combinations cannot introduce new alleles into the population and would not serve to disrupt the problems associated with inbreeding. I would love to see your peer reviewed scietific references on how inbreeding is not harmful to wild rodent populations or cow herds. Don't domestic livestock farmers pay thousands of dollars to bring in the stud from the next county instead of their own heard? Continue breeding dogs from the same lines to the same lines and you are going to produce deeply inbred strains with some very common genetic problems. The ONLY way to eliminate those alleles from the population is by outbreeding, mutations don't really fix themselves very often. Sure you can pick up some problems with genetic screening and I have no idea how good the screens are for canines, but for humans they can't detect too many disease by screening yet and we have the entire human genome at our finger tips. Your answer is sort of what I was afraid I would find within the dog breeding community, otherwise this wouldn't be the problem that it is today. One more question before I give up this discussion as an agreement to disagree: How many truly outbred (real heinz 57 mutt, not the product of an accidental purebred + sneeky neighboors dog) dogs suffer from hip dysplasia, early on set blindness, or seizures (just to name a few of the disease I have heard of)? I just don't understand how things like hip dysplasia can be nearly endemic in almost all the large breeds, but still thought of as independent of inbreeding and genetics. As far as human inbreeding, why the heck are all the super inbred royal families of Europe the first thing studied in population genetics? All their gorgeous family trees with the beautiful disease founders passing their problems from generation to generation to generation............

Since I am surrounded by scientist everyday, I often forget what life is like in the real world outside the lab :oops: I just wish that people would be more careful and considerate about things they don't understand. I worry about the future of pure bred dogs.......but I guess there are plenty of other things to worry about in the canine world.

Again, inbreeding all boils down to a game of statistics.....if you look at the children of a single first cousin marriage, there might not be much of a problem (unless their family has a previous history of in breeding), but would you ask the brother and sister of a 1st cousin marriage to get together and have some children? The fewer the members of a population that are breeding the greater the likelyhood that mutations that arise spontaneously will cause problems in the population rather than be diluted through a large genetic pool. These are the basics of nature and natural selection, I know that breeders believe in selection of genetic traits through breeding, what I don't understand is how they fail to realize that bad traits will segregate with good traits too.

Poofy, [b]Inbreeding does cause genetic disease[/b], I am a medical researcher and have taken MANY graduate level genetics classes. I realize that sceening will help prevent a disease [b]phenotype [/b] from appearing in some dogs. However, there is a genetic phenomenon call "bottle necking" when a population becomes unable to breed outside it's group, genetic mutations become trapped within the population. There are no new alleic combinations available to the population so muations in essence become "trapped" in that population. For example, if your mom and dad are related, there is a much higher frequencey that they will carry the same mutations, then there is a great chance that you will receive 2 bad copies a a certain allele. This is why endangered tigers are being crossed with lions in zoos. In order to maintain what you called "hybrid vigor" you would need to breed the F1 generations together, then begin selecting from those animals to breed a particular trait in the F2 and beyond. We do these breeding things in mice all the time, so I have some understanding and experience with mice, I'm just not as well versed in canine genetics. WE ALL HAVE MUTATIONS EVERYDAY and when you breed with only those related to you, you will have malformed off spring, I'm sorry you don't like that, but those are the facts of life. "Healthy" animals can and do harbor mutations that when crossed to a dog of a similar genetic makeup will definately present a problem for their offspring. Hobbit, I am pretty new to the idea of dog genetics, but I think that it's very cool. I have no interest in breeding dogs myself, but being a dog lover, I am wondering about the long term consequences of age old breeding practices. I have read that some breeds are almost entirely decended from a few champion lines, is this true? I would be really interested in learning more about how champion dogs are bred. Cassie, Thanks for the book title....I'm going to try and find it this week!

I read an article about dog breeding in a science magazine and I was wondering about the opinion of people who actually breed dogs. Okay, we can all agree that inbreeding is bad an causes genetic disease. So that being said, many dog breeds are seriously inbred and frought with genetic problems, right? So the suggestions made by scientist (just a general example we can talk about specifics later if your interested) would be to cross a breed like GSD with a similar dog (this was not totally clear, perhaps another similar type of shepherd), this would introduce new genetic combinations into the line, then breed those dogs back to a "pure" breed. You would then be able to select puppies/adults with the traits expected for the GSD. I was wondering if there is ANY interest in "fixing" the current breeding lines or have people become too set in their ways of pure bred to pure bred to even consider these options. This stuff makes sense to me, but then I am a geeky scientist.

okay I've gotten more information and calmed down quite a bit. As you can all imagine I was shocked to find out that Abbie had been killed. As it turns out she was hit by a car and it was a terrible accident. I am sorry that I made those people relive the accident, but as it turns out Abbie was killed in October. I wish they would have contacted me sooner or even just replied to some of my email, I probably wouldn't have been so suspicious. Anyway I have been feeling pretty lousy that I will never get to see Abbie again, I really loved that dog.

Thank you everyone for your support. I contacted the rescue group which helped us rehome Abbie. They are as concerned as we are for what happened. I am holding out a tiny glimmer of hope that these people have told another lie and that perhaps they tried to rehome Abbie themselves. I pray that the rescue will get more information from these people than I was able to get. In any case if that dog is alive, I will find her. If I can find her a least I can check on her welfare. I just feel sick, she was so amazing and I knew that these people had no idea what a wonderful dog they adopted. I understand that not everyone wants to train their dog and some people think it's fine to tie up a dog and ignore it, but I DON"T. I never would have let them even try to care for Abbie if I knew how irresponsible and uncaring they were going to be :evil:

I bought and read Dog Training for dummies, with information from Jack and Wendy Vollhard, but there wasn't enough detail to be terribly helpful. Then I bought Mother Knows best by Caryol Benjamin and I really liked that book. It was suggested to me by a woman running a dog rescue and I found that it contained lots of basic dog behaviors and why dogs do them. On the whole I found that most of the books I looked at lacked enough information to be helpful to beginers and since then I have wondered if the money isn't better spent on a good training class. Althought I have nothing against reading a good book now and then 8)

Abbie was the most beautiful lab/husky who ever lived. Everyone who ever saw her would stop me to aks about her and to pet her. Everyday that I owned her I was proud just to have known her. I am so sorry I left her in the care of others. Wait for me Abbie when I get to the bridge I am going to grab you and never let go! I promise we won't let any pesky cats both you there. Run free Abbie. I promise you I will help every dog I can in her memory for as long as I live.

I just contacted the people who adopted the lab/husky mix from me and they told me she was hit by a car and killed a couple of months ago :cry: Complete sadness is my first reaction. Then complete anger is my second reaction :evil: :evil: :evil: I knew she was in trouble the last time I saw her. They weren't keeping up with her training at all! That beautiful dog next to my name has crossed the rainbow bridge. I wish that these people would have had a brain in their heads. How in the world are you supposed to pick out good owners from a 20 minute interview in a Pet Smart! I am so ANGRY. I will NEVER EVER REHOME ANOTHER DOG FOR ANY REASON AS LONG AS I LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay so I'm not that unusual there are others like me....I have been told that a person is either a dog or a cat person. I love both types of animals for their own behaviors. Cats are NOT stupid or lazy. As a said before we had a cat when I was growing up that would use her food to lure mice out into the middle of room where she could catch them more easily and she didn't have front or rear claws. Cats are cool because they don't need as much attention as dogs but when they are raised indoors (outdoor cats have an average lifespan of 2 years....so they don't do as well all alone as people think) they still want and crave attention. Yes sometimes I get mad at my cats for sleeping on my head, but every animal can do things to bug their owners. Dogs are cool because they are easier to train, etc. My partner was strickly a cat person and I begged and begged to get a dog. At first she was shocked at how much more work a dog took. Now she said she never wants to be wothout either type of pet. IMO it's not only personal choice, but also with what types of animals you interact.

soooooo what happened with the puppy? did he get home? How is he doing?

Better late than never...... When I took her out to play, Abbie's front dew claws would often get all the skin scraped off and start bleeding. They weren't attached and when she would get runnning and slam on the brakes they would scrape on whatever surface she was stopping on, even grass. I would have definatley had them removed based on the advice of my vet. Again there would have been no bone involved....just a snip of skin and they would have been gone. I voted yes on removal, but not for cosmetic reasons, just for medical reasons.

K, I just have to say that is an awesome idea. If everyone did that there would be no trash in the world :angel: