Will we be notified when DNA results come in?

[brittney logan]

Hi Kriss, yes that is correct. I have checked your information and all you will need to do now in order to receive your kits is to validate your address. Please let us know if you have any further questions!

[rebecca rice]

Hi! I get the entire “it’s going to take time to type all of the samples”, but I am curious: Do the samples ever go bad? On the one hand, we have gotten DNA from Neanderthal teeth and frozen mammoths, so maybe not. But on the other hand, samples do degrade and get contaminated, so maybe?

[brittney logan]

Hi Rebecca, great question! As you may have noticed in the collection tubes that we send out there is a purple/blue colored solution. This is a stabilizing solution which keeps the DNA intact at room temperature. Unfortunately, we have received a couple samples where participants have dumped out this liquid and that is when the sample can go bad.

[allison colwell]

Hi! I have a similar question to everyone else in this forum, but it has been a while so I figured I’d check. I sent in our dog’s sample in May last year (I believe we were the 1st or 2nd group) and I’m wondering if you have a rough idea of how many more will be genotyped before Lilly?

DNA sample status: barcode=31001602030468; kit received Nov 2nd 2016; not yet genotyped

[brittney logan]

Hi Allison, as of right now I cannot say how long it will take or how many dog are before Lilly. Currently, we are working on a new method of assessing the samples as we hope to be able to provide you with as much data and information about your dog as possible. We apologize for the long wait, but this is the world of research and our goal is to get all the answers that we can!

[jesse mcclure]

Randy, you are quite right. Brittney has answered the same question over and over again, right here in this thread. I believe she has demonstrated remarkable patience in doing so. We have over 12 *thousand* dogs enrolled, and we do value each and every one of them – however Brittney will not publicly answer the same question 12 thousand times when the answer is readily available directly above.

Such expectations are disrespectful not only of Brittney, but also of fellow dog owners here. Does the third person to ask the same question think they are deserving of a different answer than the first?

If anything is unclear in an existing answer, feel free to seek clarification. If you’d like to learn more about our process, please check out our newsletters and blog posts which we create to do our best to keep you all informed. Then also look at the About Us page and see the number of people working on this research. That even overesitmates the number. Brittney and I are the only two for whom Darwin’s Dogs is our primary responsibility.

We have invested money, time, effort, and expertise into creating Darwin’s Dogs. We have asked participants only to invest a little time in answering surveys, and a fair bit of patience as we fine tune methods to get reliable data from DNA samples. This is research – we are pioneering new ground finding new ways to get information out of dog DNA that no one has done before. This is not a product that you purchased. If what you have invested in this seems too much, and does not feel equitable to you, then I’d be sorry to lose you as a contributor to this great opportunity.

Feel free to send questions, comments, suggestions, or any other feedback to the info@darwinsdogs.org which Michele answers, or on the forums here which Brittney keeps a close eye on. If you have harsher critiques or complaints those need not be vented on the forums to Brittney or via an email to Michele – but feel free to send them directly to me at jmcclure@darwinsdogs.org.

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