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Post by racheldaniels on Apr 3, 2012 18:52:07 GMT -5
Eh. I'm an optimist. To even get funding for sequencing at these levels you have to make the proposition attractive to the government. Even the white papers (the third link posted above is part of a white paper) for the dog and horse genomes have had the same stated purposes as the ferret: to find better explanations for human diseases.
Once the results are out, anyone and everyone has access to them. I'd anticipate that the diversity studies will lead to tools that would allow private breeders to compare their stock to others, and to the background 'standard' of the Marshall ferrets. It'll be interesting if someone gets funding for work with the polecats as well. With sequencing costs decreasing rapidly, it's not unreasonable to hope that even coalitions of breeders and owners could do this work themselves. The challenge will be to interpret the results. But we could figure out the levels of inbreeding within different populations as well as to start to tease apart some of the gene associations.
The dog studies are an interesting model.. the Broad Institute also has a project to study different lines and breeds where owners submit their dogs' DNA (blood) for analysis. If ferret owners could eventually do the same, it might be really neat and helpful.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 3, 2012 20:05:00 GMT -5
I could see breeders associations doing this. The trick would be gathering ferret database information and getting time at the facility that reads the DNA. Are the other species domesticated varieties only or are they collecting feral species like dingo's, mustang horses, etc. as well? They'd have to follow the animals around the landscape to get samples of DNA. The same with the polecats.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2012 7:54:19 GMT -5
The horses are domesticated breeds as far as I know. It's pretty straightforward, however, to draw blood if you have to trap or treat a wild animal for another purpose for a study.
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