Reply To: Genetic diversity results + health issues questions

[jessica hekman]

Thanks for checking in!

Genetic diversity is a complex measurement. The results we are returning as part of breed ancestry are really a brute force overview and NOT something that should be used to make any assumptions about the dog’s actual genetic diversity overall. We are currently exploring the possibility of providing better diversity results, but there are some technical hurdles to overcome first.

(For the nerdy among you: in order to really say if it is surprising that a dog is homozygous at a particular allele, we have to know the frequency of both versions of that allele in the general population. For example, if 99% of dogs have exactly the same version of a particular gene, and it is super rare to have a different version, then we don’t want to ding a dog as “less diverse” for having two identical copies of that gene. So right now we’re working on getting the frequency of various alleles throughout a large sample of dogs. A really large sample… so the computation time is on the order of months. So that’s where that project stands!)

As for genetic conditions, we are not returning information about those, because we don’t feel comfortable with the validity of the tests available. We are working on giving everyone more information about their dogs beyond just breed – we’re hoping in the next few months to have more results back.