[jessica hekman]

Definitely thank you for letting me know! It’s really nice to know they’re not just going out into a void 🙂

[jessica hekman]

Jennifer – I think you might be surprised at how much of a problem this still is! Researchers are tackling the problem of terminology standards, but very much in advance of clinicians. I suspect your mother would have similar issues today with communicating with many doctors. But at least the standards are getting in place. Maybe eventually they will trickle down to be useful at the patient level.

[jessica hekman]

Great question. Right now we’re just looking at answers as a snapshot in time, and we ask that you NOT update them as the dog ages. (We take into account the dog’s age at the time the surveys were answered.) We do really want to put in place the ability to re-answer over time so we can track how personality changes over time. But we’re not there yet sadly.

[jessica hekman]

Thanks, Kristen! I’m really glad folks are enjoying the updates. This helps incentivize me to post another one today – it’s on my list to do, anyways!

[jessica hekman]

That’s my best guess, too – labs looove food! (Well, most of them do.) In our house, we call this “getting the molecules,” as in “Jenny, are there any molecules of food left on that plate?”

[jessica hekman]

I didn’t actually have to do all of them manually – I wrote a computer script to do a lot of them. The script itself involved a lot of “how many of them can I get automatically this way? How about this way?” but in the end it got most of them, leaving only a couple dozen maybe to do manually. Still took a few days!

So I’m not sure what I’ll find about differences by age, but I’d guess activity level might be one we’d see. Hopefully I’ll get to grips with this this week. If I find anything I’ll post here to let you folks know.

[jessica hekman]

For what it’s worth, Ann, this ended up being a really interesting problem. We are pretty close to having it figured out – should be able to get you an answer tomorrow. But in short, yes, this sample is not from your dog. You were right.

[jessica hekman]

I have an ES too!

You can actually just type whatever you want in to the breed list – if it’s not an option that’s available, just type it anyways. It will go in!

[jessica hekman]

Yes, we are starting with just breed for now. Hard as it is to call breed correctly, it’s still the most straightforward analysis! We’re moving forward with more stuff gradually.

[jessica hekman]

Ellen – thanks for letting us know! I went in as you and updated, and it let me change Boone’s birthdate to 12-28. Please let me know if you have any trouble changing anything else.

[jessica hekman]

If you click on that “Order DNA Kit” button it will tell you that you already have an Explorer Level kit, but will offer you the option of a Trailblazer Kit. (We don’t expect many people to be interested in Trailblazer – it’s expensive, but offers very deep sequencing of a dog’s genome.)

Thanks for being one of our early participants!

[jessica hekman]

Oh I see – sorry, I should have read more closely! We are all a little frantic today keeping up with all the mail about breed results being in.

So, at the present time we don’t have any way to store or work with that information. But we are actively working on building a way for folks to give us that information through the website. So stay tuned! We do hope it will happen in 2019.

[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.

[jessica hekman]

It’s going to be easiest for me to figure this out by email – I’ll send you email now.

[jessica hekman]

Hi, Deborah. I just checked – indeed, we haven’t scanned Riley’s kit in yet. I’m guessing what happened is that she was part of our big push to get our last “old” kits out the door before our changeover to our new website. Then our site was down for the move for several weeks, and this also made it impossible for us to enter newly-arrived kits into the system (our database was down too).

We are working through that backlog of kits now. I’m not worried about her kit getting lost in the mail – but if it was, we’ll send you a new one. I’ll keep a note to check on it and let you know, but feel free to email team@darwinsark.org to ask us its status again in a few weeks.

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