Dogs come in all shapes and sizes, but variations in color patterns provide some of their most distinctive characteristics. A newly released study sheds light on a subset of these patterns, unexpectedly leading to new questions about long-held tenets of dog evolution.
The study, co-authored by Professor Danika Bannasch, the Maxine Adler Endowed Chair in Genetics at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, was published Aug. 12 in Nature Evolution and Ecology. It reveals structural variants that control expression of the agouti signaling protein, or ASIP, gene at two separate locations to produce five distinctive dog color patterns. These different patterns are widespread, occurring in hundreds of dog breeds and hundreds of millions of dogs around the world.
The question of when these changes arose surprised the group of international researchers. [Read more…] about Dog coat patterns have ancient origin