They were closer to the Arabian than to the three South African breeds tested, the Nooitgedacht pony, the Boer pony and the Basuto pony.
An abnormal formation of the hip socket, known as hip dysplasia, affected nearly 64% of Pugs in a survey performed by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals; the breed was ranked the second worst-affected by this condition out of 157 breeds tested.
The finding that these geographically separate populations are genetically similar is entirely consistent with the recorded history of the breeds tested.
This has proven successful in cattle [48] and the observation that approximately one third of markers were polymorphic in all of the breeds tested indicates that a carefully selected subset of SNP should have utility in almost any sheep breed.
Pre-infection, the amount of NO produced by BALF cells was similar for all breeds tested.
The exact test for population differentiation based on allele frequency variations shows that all breeds tested were significantly different from each other (P < 0.0001, unpublished data).
The CN varies significantly from 21 to 308 for HSFY, and 28 to 380 for ZNF280BY among all bulls, with a variable MCN among 15 breeds tested.
Of the breeds tested to date, only Brown Swiss cattle are known to encode 7 octapeptide repeats [ 16, 17], and they have been reported to be more susceptible to BSE than other cattle breeds [ 18, 19].
BALF levels of IFN-γ increased significantly from pre-infection to 21 days post-infection for all pig breeds tested, suggesting that a cellular immune response occurs locally a long time period after infection.
Our demonstration of a high overall level of polymorphism, likely to modify the ligand-binding capacity of receptors distributed differently within the six breeds tested, is the first step towards understanding why Labrador Retrievers and German Shepherd Dogs have a much greater potential for use as sniffer dogs than Pekingese dogs or Greyhounds.
