Genetic Testing

There are loads of different laboratories that are relatively well used for working with genetic variation and mapping genes and loci in the genetic mass of our breeds. These results can give us lots of valuable information about our dogs genetically and what combinations we should make to help the breed best genetically. It helps us locate rare genes and gene variants that we should preserve before they die out completely in the breed, etc. We also get a picture of what the actual genetic variation in a breed looks like, the COI of the breed. 

But we also want to clearly point out that these laboratories often re-report lots of other information as well. Such as may not be completely relevant to the genetic mapping or information that can be misused if it falls into the hands of the person with errors or too little knowledge of how to handle the results.

for example, it will return a long list of quantities with various disease genes and whether the dog is a carrier or not a carrier of genes that can cause diseases. We must be extremely careful with this part of the information, as a genetic disease never has the same inheritance in one breed as another. All dogs can have errors and flaws in their genome, but that does not mean that we should automatically exclude them from breeding. We can't eradicate all suspected disease genes but we can keep our breeds in enough genetic variation that we get healthy dogs. There is a risk that we will get fewer instead of more animals in breeding if people start staring too much at that information. Per Erik Sundgeren, geneticist, once said that a defective dog does not necessarily need to inherit its defective effect, but too narrow a genetic variation creates diseases we have not seen before. 

Another part of the information that comes back from these laboratories is what breeds the individual dog tested has in it. An example is the Siberian husky that recently got back results where it was claimed there were traces of the Alaskan husky, which started panic and stupid ideas about testing and not breeding dogs with such results instead of being happy that there are unique genes and locus that can help the breed survive genetically. Then we don't know very much about which values ​​or algorithms these laboratories use to determine a breed. It must also be clear that there may be traces of different genetic flows in all our dogs as they somewhere share a historical origin, some closer and some more distant. Then there has certainly been incorrect registration and cross-breeding of other breeds has taken place in most breeds' stud books in the last 100 years, when all registration is done on the basis of a certificate from the breeder. In our Western studbooks, breeds have been classified according to phenotypic appearance and not according to genotypic structure.