Dog breeds have been compared to human races. However, DNA researches show that...
Read more …Dog breeds have been compared to human races. However, DNA researches show that
dog breeds are much more genetically diverse than human races and that they can be classified very accurately.
In a 2004 paper in Science, Parker et al. showed that very accurate classification is
possible (410 of 414 dogs were correctly assigned to their breed). They also showed by Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA, a technique often used for estimating genetic variability using microsattelites andrepeats, although it can also be used for SNPs) that 27% of genetic variance is between breeds. Using SNP data, they calculated an Fst
distance between the breeds of 0.33. A recent paper on a genome-wide SNP analysis on 919 dogs from 85 breeds, showed by AMOVA that 65.1% of genetic variance was within breeds, 31.1% between breeds, and 3.8% between breed groups (they defined 10 different groups: Spaniels, Retrievers, etc.). They also that as few as 20
diagnostic SNPs can be used to accurately classify dogs into their breeds.
How does the genetic variation in dogs compare to that of humans? AMOVA analysis of humans shows that approximately 85% of variance is between individuals, 5% is between populations in the same racial group, and 10% is interracial (btw, this number is also close to the updated Fst measurement of Xing et al.). The average Fst distance between human races is approximately 0.15.
