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Dogs are excellent models for studying genetics, especially disease genetics. Work done in the last 20 years has shown that dogs share many gene-related disorders with people. Each breed is a closed reproductive population with distinct rates of heritable diseases, which dramatically increases the odds of finding disease-related loci. In creating new dog breeds, we reduce the gene pool within those populations, and fix many alleles. This homogeneous background makes it much easier to map QTLs and perform linkage analyses

The many forms of dogs that exist today were all created through selective breeding from the dog's ancestor, the wolf. In a span of less than 10,000 years, breeders have changed traits and body shapes of dogs by artificial selection-for example, emphasizing different aspects of hunting and herding behavior.

There's a lot we don't know about how and when dogs were first domesticated. But we do know that the process made dogs very different from their wild cousins, in some unexpected ways.

Interactive genetics game of increasing complexit.