Dog as a mammalian genetic model

Up to recently, studies on dog genetics were rather scare notwithstanding the enormous potential that the canine model can offer in the study of the genotype/phenotype relationship and the analysis of the causes of many genetic diseases, with simple or complex inheritance, that affect dogs but also the human population. This potentiality is essentially due to the natural history of dogs whose domestication from wolves dated back 15,000 years, at least. All modern dogs originated from a limited number of female wolves from Eastern Asia. By applying a combination of selections and strong inbreeding practices, humans have created over 350 breeds, each of them corresponding to a genetic isolate and altogether offering a unique panel of polymorphism never encountered in any other mammals. In this review we summarized what makes dogs an unavoidable model. Contrary to the classical models like the two yeasts, nematode, fish, fly, mouse, or rat mainly used to understand the function of genes, dog with the creation across the centuries of numerous breeds offers a unique opportunity to study the role of their alleles. We report recent data on the construction of genomic maps and on the sequencing program of the dog genome launched by the National Institute of Health (NIH). To take fully advantage of the canine model, we advocate for the systematic construction of a rich canine single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) ressource to perform linkage desiquilibrium studies of normal or pathological traits as well as to get insight into the genetic diversity of the canine species.