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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8430
A female boxer dog has provided the DNA for the first complete sequence of the dog genome, putting into the doghouse the patchy, 80% coverage of a poodle called Shadow, published two years ago.
A publicly funded consortium led by Kerstin Lindblad-Toh of the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, used the shotgun sequencing technique to map the genome of Tasha, an inbred boxer. With this technique the genome is first broken into fragments and the DNA sequence of each determined. Then a computer stitches the fragments back together.
The process must be repeated several times to ensure accuracy, and the new draft is the product of 7.5 repetitions. The genome of Shadow, the poodle owned by gene-entrepreneur Craig Venter, had only 1.5 times coverage. The boxer was chosen as it is highly inbred. That means the difference between its paired chromosomes are smaller, making sequencing easier.
Domestic dogs vary wildly in appearance, yet their genomes are 99.85% similar. The boxer and the poodle, for example, differ by about a single nucleotide change in every 900 bases. “A dog is a dog in a genomic sense,” says Lindblad-Toh.