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brittney loganKeymasterHello all,
We are so excited to have these dogs enrolled with us!
Even though we do not have “dingo” or “village dog” in our reference panel, these dogs are still very important, and interesting to study.
Results for your dingo or village dog will likely come back as breeds in our panel that have similar ancestry, and even a portion of unknown.
As the research continues and more of these dogs are sequenced with us, we hope to expand on our results and how we can report the ancestry back to owners like yourselves.
We have actually written up a post about “non-dog breeds” and village dogs, which some of you may find interesting!
Check it out at:
brittney loganKeymasterHi Gage,
Yes we are happy to provide you with the raw data files. I received your email, and will be sending them shortly.
Thank you for enrolling your dog with us, and we hope you have fun with the data!
brittney loganKeymasterHi Trish,
We do not yet have Catahoula Leopard Dog in our reference panel. The more Catahoula Leopard Dogs that enroll and are sequenced, the more likely we will be able to add that breed! We need 12 unrelated purebred individuals enrolled and sequenced in order for us to add them to the panel.
Even though we do not yet have your dogs breed in the panel, we are more than happy to have them participate. As of right now, if your dogs were sequenced, the results would come back as calling the most related breeds. But please know, that results are updated if any changes are made to the panel.
Thank you very much for enrolling both of your dogs in our research. We are excited to learn about their unique behaviors and personalities, and to see what they are hiding in their DNA!
brittney loganKeymasterHi Lyle,
We are so sorry to hear of your loss, our sincerest condolences.
That is wonderful that you have a blood sample, and we can certainly use that for the Trailblazer, whole genome sequencing if interested.
Please know that there may be additional costs since blood samples, and the extraction of them, are not usually in our sequencing pipeline.
If you have any questions or concerns we would be happy to chat with you about the details at support@darwinsark.org
brittney loganKeymasterHi Cassandra,
We apologies for the long wait with the free participation. As mentioned above, it is not so much a “backlog” but more so that we need to acquire more grant funding in order to support the sending out and sequencing of our free participation samples. The “wait” is also dependent on when enrolled, how many surveys have been completed, and again, if the dog is a fit for the grant approved at that time.
We have a hardy system in place to keep track of the data and samples in our procession. The samples can remain stable and viable for years! 🙂
Please know that this is research oriented, and we are not business run like other canine genetics tests out there.
With that said, our sequencing methods differ from that of other test – we look at nearly 5,000,000 markers in the DNA compared to that of Embark (200,000) and Wisdom Panel (1,800).
Again, we apologize for the long wait with the free participation, but we continue to apply for more grants to support the research and your dogs DNA sample. If you do not wish to wait any longer, we have added the option for owners to support their dogs sample for sequencing.
brittney loganKeymasterAngie:
Thank you for enrolling all of your dogs! We apologize for the long wait for one of them, whom is participating for free. We continue to apply for more grant money to support these samples.
There are many variables to our “waitlist” such as when the dog enrolled, how many surveys have been completed and if dog’s survey answers fit the grant that we have received. Please know that we so also pick dogs at random to be sent out in order to not bias the data.
brittney loganKeymasterAlex:
Thank you for enrolling your dog in our research! You are more than welcome to share the Embark results with us, and once your dog has a Darwin’s Ark DNA sample, we can compare them!
That is all we can really do with the Embark results though, we will need a new DNA sample from your dog for our specific research. This is because our sequencing methods look at many more markers in your dogs DNA.
So while having the Embark results is interesting, we will still need a sample from your dog for Darwin’s Ark. You are welcome to participate on the Free Kit Waitlist or Order Analysis, however you would prefer to participate!
brittney loganKeymasterLori:
Since we already have your dog’s DNA sample on hand, it will only be $99.00 to support it.
Please log in and go to “My Laboratory” and under your dogs name, you will see “Order Analysis” where it will provide you with the $99.00 option.
If you have any other questions, I am happy to help, or please email us at support@darwinsark.org
brittney loganKeymasterHi Trish,
We hope you are well!
Our apologies in the delay in updates. We are getting the samples out for sequencing and providing results, just at a bit of a slower pace than before the pandemic. I am happy to email you directly to inform you of your dogs status.
brittney loganKeymasterHi Hasan,
Great question!
When you go to “View Laboratory” and you see on the left hand side “Other Members- Invite People” these invites are specifically to your dogs profile. So by inviting people there, they will be able to see your dog’s profile. This may be helpful for multiple owners of one dog, say other family members who want to be involved.
I hope this helps to explain the invite option, please let me know if you have any other questions.
brittney loganKeymasterHi Sam,
Thank you for enrolling!
This project is still very active, and we cannot wait to learn more about your dog.
Please make sure to login and on the top tab click on My Laboratory -> View Laboratory. This will take you to your dogs profile, where you will see the options to either order the DNA kit or join the Free Kit waitlist.
If you are still having trouble, please try a different device or webpage browser, or please email us directly at support@darwinsark.org so we can further assist you.
November 19, 2020 at 6:04 pm in reply to: Will there be new surveys and/or longitudinal studies #15452
brittney loganKeymasterHi Maxine,
First off, thank you so much for your kind words and support! We truly believe in open science, and we are happy to share how this research works.
As the research continues, we will certainly be adding more surveys, and you are right on the money about adding surveys regarding life stages! We have talked about adding surveys that go through puppyhood, adolescence, midlife and elderly age. We collaborate with the IAABC, and reference many other already published surveys when creating them. These surveys are still work in progress, but hopefully in the near future they will be added.
As your dog ages, we know behaviors may change. So we do provide the option to re-take any of the surveys. All original survey answers are saved in our database, so we will know if the answers changed over time.
Our apologies if you have been waiting some time for the Free Kit, but we greatly appreciate your patience and willingness to support you dogs DNA sample if you choose to go that route. We continue to apply for more grant money so that we can support our free participants. The survey data provide by owners absolutely helps us to assess and write up grants to receive more funding!
Again, thank you for the support, we are excited to learn more about your dog!
brittney loganKeymasterHi Joanne,
Even though we do not have his breed in our reference panel (yet!), we would still love to have him participate to the fullest!
You inclination is correct. Once your dog is sequenced, the results will likely come back identifying breeds that are related to the Bedlington Terrier, and might also have a good portion of “unknown”.
As the research continues and more dogs provide DNA samples, our reference panel will grow. In order to add a breed into our reference panel, we need at least 12 non-related individuals with sequenced data. When a new breed is added to the panel, we re-run all our participants data and will update the results.
If you know others with Bedlington Terriers, please let them know about our research! It would be wonderful to have this breed in our panel.
If you have not checked our our blog post regarding our results and updated reference panel here are the links below:
Updated Panel
Understanding the Results
brittney loganKeymasterHi Lisa,
We do not use Embark, but you are more than welcome to share your dog’s Embark results with us so then we can do a comparison of their results to ours.
If interested in sharing, please check out our blog post regarding how to go about it:
With our sequencing methods, we can look at over 5,000,000 markers in the DNA compared to that of Embark, which is “over 200,000”. Embark does however have more breeds in their reference panel compared to our study. As our research continues and more dogs enroll providing more DNA samples, we hope to continuously grow the number of breeds that we can identify.
I hope this helps!
Brittney
brittney loganKeymasterHi Karen,
We understand your concerns and frustrations.
Thank you for recognizing that this is truely research based, and we do deeply apologize for the long wait.
We have the capability and technologies to be sequencing these samples, but the sequencing itself is costly. We are continuously searching for, and apply for more grants so that we can support our free participation samples. With the behavioral data that you and other participants are providing, it is greatly helping our research to discover and propose new studies for these grants.
In order for this research to work, and to discover correlations between behavior and genetics. we need THOUSANDS of dogs to participate. We wanted to be able to provide participation options to our citizen scientists, letting them decide, but we have stated that it can indeed take time for the free participation.
Again, I am so sorry that it has been so long, and we are just as eager to have the data! 🙂
Everyday, we continue our endeavor with the behavioral and genetic data that we have, applying for more funds so that we can support even more participants. As the data grows, so does our knowledge of canine behavior and genetics, thanks to our participating owners and their dogs.
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