Those short, thick, stumpy, wobbly, knobbly, stubby, crooked appendages. One of the many things we love about the dachshund. How did they come to be? Science magazine offers up a clue, and here's an excerpt: In 2007, geneticist Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues found a single gene in short dogs that regulated the expression of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1); the gene was missing in giant breeds.
Ostrander's lab has homed in on the "short" gene in detail and found a new surprise: Not only does it make dogs small, but some dogs carry an extra genetic element inserted by chance into chromosome 15. The element--a so-called retrogene--changes the expression of IGF-1 and gives the dogs the distinctive short, bowed forelimbs of chondrodysplasia.
Read all about it at Science magazine.
Photo Details: cachorritas1 by flickr photographer donsabas. Nice legs!
No comments:
Post a Comment