This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Dogs descended from Eurasian gray wolves, but where and how this process occurred is poorly understood. Much genetic research has focused on breed dogs, but the diverse populations of semi-feral "village" dogs are likely an important key for understanding dog domestication. In this project, samples will be collected and analyzed for village dogs across Eurasia and compared to samples from breed dogs and wolves. Genotyping will be done on high-throughput (60,000 marker) arrays yielding unprecedented resolution of the dog genome, but only a partial picture of genetic diversity since these markers consist largely of variants found from the boxer and poodle genomes. Therefore, sequencing a subset of village dogs and wolves will be done to detect novel variation in these groups and determine how much biased marker ascertainment affects genetic inference from these arrays.
As high-throughput genomic tools are developed for more and more organisms, tremendous research opportunities exist for studying related populations and species. Developing methods of genetic inference robust to ascertainment bias is crucial for utilizing these tools. This study will likely to challenge current theories of dog origins and develop village dogs into a useful system for the study of domestication, speciation, behavior and morphology.
