Lancashire Heelers / Increase in already known DNA?

[casey stanton]

Hello! I just saw my dog gene profile updates – very fun!

Background, when I adopted my dog Nigel they said he was mixed breed with lancashire heeler. I have no idea how they came up with that, but when I google them (having never heard of them before), he looks exactly like them but with some little mixed breed differences. But body type, face, tail, even general coloring – it appeared spot on to me that he was mostly that type of dog.

So when the first round of DNA came back with almost 50% of Nigel’s DNA as ‘unknown’, it made sense to me because Lancashire Heeler wasn’t on your breed list, with the update, he has almost no unknown DNA but lancashire heeler still isn’t on the list and the other breeds have gone way up.

So my questions (which are prob difficult for you answer specifically)

1. What are the chances that he would look VERY similar to a specific type of dog which isn’t in the profile… but doesn’t actually have any meaningful amount of their DNA? Like, to me, it seems like a crazy coincidence that a random combination of other breeds would produce a dog that looks really, really, similar to a specific breed, but he doesn’t have any meaningful amount of their DNA.

2. Why would the percent of him being pomeranian, for example, have INCREASED? Shouldn’t the already known DNA have stayed the same and just the portion that was ‘unknown’ change? How did he gain more pomeranian DNA if that one was already tested for?

3. Is it possible that without having Lancashire heeler in the algorithm, it would try to sort the unknowns into other camps? (I am a lawyer, forgive me if that’s an insanely unlikely scientific / statistical situation). Like, if some of the ‘unknown’ DNA, was actually pomeranian, but the program didn’t recognize it the first run, isn’t it possible that if another breed was available to sort into, it might recognize DNA that was improperly categorized the first and second run?

Sorry for rambling! I love this study 🙂

(if you could delete my first post, i edited for clarity but it’s not letting me update the original post)

[Jennifer]

I don’t know what Nigel looks like, but with reference to his current breed results as mentioned in your other thread, I could definitely imagine a “Chorkie” coming out looking a fair amount like a very petite Lancashire, especially if its Chi parent were short-haired (dominant trait). All three of his primary breeds have prick ears, and they can also all be black-and-tan like Lancashires (recessive). Being 20 lbs. and dwarfed (I’m assuming you’re saying he’s dwarfed i.e. ultra-short legs) probably couldn’t be explained by those three breeds alone, but the other 10% might include a dwarfed, much heavier breed(s). In any case, Lancashires are pretty rare, even in the UK, so for a shelter mutt to be high-content-Lancashire would be very surprising, although stranger things have happened.

With this latest revision, my dog also showed gains of % ancestry for 4 of the breeds already detected in her. In her case this probably(?) has something to do with much of her ancestry consisting of rather closely related herding breeds, therefore lots of confounding genetic overlap. I’m not sure whether something like that could apply to Nigel. I think it’s maybe kinda like trying to piece together an enormous jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know what the final image is supposed to show…those portions of it that initially fall into place for you fairly quickly, you’ll probably still have to revise later, once you’ve figured out what some of the other components are, because your working mental image of each component is continuously getting modified by new information about other portions. Even so, assuming the person doing the puzzle is reasonably mentally competent, their initial misconceptions are still going to fall within a certain limited range.

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