The possession of a dog is influenced by the genetic constitution

A team of Swedish and British scientists studied the heritability of owning a dog with the help of information from 35,035 couples from the Swedish registry. The new study suggests that genetic variation accounts for more than half of the variation in a dog 's ownership, implying that the choice of getting a dog is strongly influenced by the genetic constitution of a dog. an individual.

Dogs have been the first domestic animal and have had close relationships with humans for at least 15,000 years. Today, dogs are common pets and are considered to improve the well-being and health of their owners. The team compared the genetic makeup of twins (using the Swedish Twin Registry, the largest of its kind in the world) and the possession of a dog. The results are published for the first time in Scientific reports. The purpose was to determine if the property of a dog had a hereditary component.

"We were surprised to see that a person's genetic makeup seems to have a significant influence on owning a dog, so these findings have major implications in many areas related to understanding the interaction." dog-man throughout history and in the modern world Although dogs and other pets are part of the household worldwide, their impact on our daily lives and health is poorly understood. -being that some people have a greater innate propensity to take care of a pet than others, "says Tove Fall, lead author of the study and professor of molecular epidemiology at the Department of Science. and the Science for Life laboratory at Uppsala University.

Carri Westgarth, lecturer in human-animal interaction at the University of Liverpool and co-author of the study, adds: "These findings are important because they suggest that the supposed health benefits of owning a dog reported in some studies may be partly explained by different factors: genetics of the people studied.

The study of twins is a well-known method for unraveling the influences of the environment and genes on biology and behavior. Since identical twins share their entire genome and non-identical twins share only half of the genetic variation, the comparison of the intra-pair match of a dog's ownership between groups reveals whether the Genetics plays a role in owning a dog. The researchers found that concordance rates between dog owners were much higher among identical twins than among non-identical ones, which supports the view that genetics play a major role in the choice of possession. A dog.

"These types of studies on twins can not tell us exactly which genes are involved, but at least demonstrate for the first time that genetics and the environment play an equal role in determining property ownership." The next obvious step is to attempt to identify the genetic variants affecting this phenomenon.Patrick Magnusson, lead author of the study and associate professor of epidemiology at the department of D & D. Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Karolinska Insitutet (Sweden) and Head of the Swedish Twin Registry.

"The study has major implications for understanding the deep and enigmatic history of the domestication of dogs," says zooarchaeologist and co-author Keith Dobney, director of human paleoecology at the Department of Medicine. Archeology, Classical Studies and Egyptology from the University of Liverpool. "Decades of archaeological research have helped us build a better picture of where and when dogs have entered the human world, but ancient and modern genetic data now allow us to explore directly the why and the how. "