Our overall goal is to greatly improve the knowledge on the dog genome as a model for human health. The project will generate the most comprehensive functional information source of the dog genome to facilitate the highest resolution gene mappings for disease, morphology and behaviour. This will be exemplified by identifying risk variants for common brain diseases.
As this project advances, we are creating a genomic resource that will soon be made publicly available, serving the international research community in their efforts to uncover the molecular mechanisms behind disease, morphology, and behavior. We are thrilled to announce that our first article from this project has been accepted for publication in Nature Communications, marking a major milestone! This resource will facilitate the development of more efficient and targeted treatment strategies for both dogs and humans.
Our specific aims involve the following:
Towards these aims, the project will
Generate a fresh tissue biobank from dogs and wolves (~120 tissues)
Utilize transcriptomics approaches such as STRT and CAGE to generate the massive data for annotation
Create necessary bio-IT resources, databases and genome browsers to analyse and provide access to the data.