CRAIG VENTER’S poodle Shadow has been put in the shade. The controversial gene-entrepreneur’s pooch was the first to have its genome sequenced, but it was only a rough draft (Â鶹´«Ã½, 4 October 2003, p 14). Now a female boxer dog named Tasha (below), has provided the DNA for the first complete dog sequence.
A publicly funded consortium led by Kerstin Lindblad-Toh of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used the “shotgun” sequencing technique to map Tasha’s genome. For this, the genome is broken into random fragments, which are sequenced and then virtually stitched back together by a computer…
