Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Man's Best Friend Has Been Sequenced...Again
The publicly-funded sequencing consortium has announced the completion of the sequence of a female Boxer named Tasha. This is a more complete sequence than the one I worked on at Celera Genomics three years ago. We sequenced Dr. Craig Venter's poodle, Shadow, when I was there. Craig was the President and CSO of Celera at the time and could pretty much do what he wanted...like have his own genome sequenced, and he did. He was one of the five donors that we sequenced. I have posted some pics of Tasha and Shadow along with a link to the press release.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,177989,00.html
As a scientist, I don't wholly agree with the evolutionary argument, but the authors state that dogs evolved from wolves 15-100 thousand years ago...you be the judge. Regardless, I think it's fascinating and would like to share it since I worked on the first dog sequencing effort at Celera. Some of the other notable genomes that I worked on aside from dog were chimp, rat, mouse, chicken, pig, mosquito, cow, pufferfish (Fugu-yummy as long as there is no poison gland), and various extremophiles that have huge names that I can't remember.
