The first draft of the dog genome sequence has been deposited into free public databases for use by biomedical and veterinary researchers around the globe, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced.

The breed of dog sequenced was the boxer, which was chosen after analyses of 60 dog breeds found it was one of the breeds with the least amount of variation in its genome and therefore likely to provide the most reliable reference genome sequence.

The NHGRI-supported researchers are currently comparing the dog and human genome sequences and plan to publish results of their analysis in the next several months.

The dog genome is similar in size to the genomes of humans and other mammals, containing approximately 2.5 billion DNA base pairs. Due to a long history of selective breeding, many types of dogs are prone to genetic diseases that are difficult to study in humans, such as cancer, heart disease, deafness, blindness and autoimmune disorders. In addition, the dog is an important model for the genetics of behaviour and is used extensively in pharmaceutical research, the NIH release says.

To best characterize disease in dogs, it is important to have a sufficient number of markers in the genome. Therefore, in addition to the boxer, nine other dog breeds, four wolves and a coyote were sampled to generate markers that can be used in disease studies in any dog breed.

A team led by Kerstin Lindblad-Toh of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Mass, and Agencourt Bioscience Corp, Beverly, Mass assembled the genome of the domestic dog (Canis familiaris).

Researchers can access the sequence data through GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank) at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).