Fine pedigrees:
The new study began one day in the late 1980s, when Dodman attended a dog-training class at Tufts’ veterinary school. He was training a 1-year-old white, male Bull Terrier. The dog’s owner approached him after class and asked if he knew anything about tail-chasing behavior in the breed. Coincidentally, Dodman had recently stumbled upon a case report about tail-chasing.
Dodman took the man upstairs to his office to look at the paper more closely, and discovered that it described a 1-year-old white, male Bull Terrier.
“Here they were displaying absolutely identical behaviors. And I went, oh my god, this is genetic,” Dodman recalls.
He began collecting blood samples of Bull Terriers. In 2000, he met
, director of the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory at University of Massachusetts.
Interested in the genetic underpinnings of depression, Ginns had for years studied isolated groups of people, such as the Amish, or ethnic groups with fairly homogeneous genetic roots, such as Ashkenazi Jews. Because these groups are genetically similar, differences between individuals with and without a specific disease are relatively easy to spot.
“But one disadvantage of pedigrees is they’re very hard to find. And even if you find them, it’s difficult to exquisitely characterize the symptoms,” Ginns says. “So it was of high interest to me that Nick had this dog population.”
Aus meinem ersten Link, scheint tatsächlich genetisch zu sein.