Genes help explain distinct behaviors between dog breeds

Not only are dogs considered man's best friends, they inhabit the world and are so diverse, with so many distinctive traits and behaviors across different breeds, that it is easy to forget how we currently have so many of them out there.

For the animal welfare and ethics professor and director of the Animal and Society Interaction Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine James A. Serpell, people often breed dogs, most of the time with the effort to generate particular behaviors, such as hunting, guarding or companionship with humans.

We often forget how varied the canine world is, but for the assistant professor at the University of Washington Department of Psychology Noah Snyder-Mackler, they can present a good model that can help you understand how these behavioral variations are related to genetic differences., the environment and the experiences.

Although it seems rather obvious that genes influence individual behaviors, proving with evidence was not an easy task, especially since behaviors are very complex traits. Behaviors such as anxiety, compulsion to pursue and aggression are caused by several genes and not just one.

And that's where the dogs come in. Dog breeds are highly endogamous and have allowed researchers to make progress in this area of ​​study. The researchers recognized that if one breed of dog is linked to a specific behavior that can distinguish it from another breed, it may be "easier" to detect the genetic variants involved in this behavior by comparing that breed's genome to others.

Serpell used the behavioral data from the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ), a survey of over 50, 000 dog owners in which behavioral characteristics are mentioned.

Dog Genetic Differences May Explain Human Behavior Differences

To cross-check the data and conduct the study, the researchers used 14, 020 C-BARQ data entries that included information on purebred dogs. In addition, they used data from two previous studies in which 172, 000 genome points were sequenced.

By crossing and analyzing the data, they found that approximately half of the 14 measured behaviors between races can be attributed to genetics. "This was based on middle-race behavior because we didn't have behavioral and genetic information from the same animals, " said Evan L. MacLean, assistant professor at the University of Arizona School of Anthropology.

Inheritance of parents

Behaviors such as trainability, predatory persecution, aggression directed at strangers, and attention seeking attained a higher heritability rate, with genetics “hitting” between 60% and 70% of the variation between races. "These are exactly the types of traits that have been selected for specific dog breeds, " said Serpell.

With a vast set of genomic data, the researchers also looked for genetic variants associated with race differences and located some in genes that may even influence human behavior. The researchers also hypothesized that genetic differences affected the brain and sought to see where the genes in which the major variants appeared were expressed in the body. According to the analysis, they are more likely to be expressed in the brain than in other body tissue.

But we need to go deeper and studies must continue. “We are not yet at a point where we can analyze an individual's genome and predict behavior. The environment and the training still have a very, very strong effect, ”said Snyder-Mackler.

The research was published in the Royal Society B Annals.