The dog has its day

摘要

Dogs have a special place in our society. Man's best friend is not just a valuable hunting partner, guard and herd manager — most of the worlds estimated 400 million dogs are pets. Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated (at least 15,000 years ago). They all originate from a single and relatively homogeneous species — the wolf — but modern breeds display an extraordinary diversity of traits (or phenotypes). The hundreds of years of careful inbreeding to produce the many kinds of dog have delivered a geneticist's dream model of human genetic disease (Box 1, overleaf). But to unlock the full potential of this model, we need to understand the genetic basis for the unprecedented diversity and how it has evolved. The high-quality draft sequence of the dog genome described on page 803 of this issue is a good starting-point for that research.