Canine dominance bows to tabby chic as cat sequencing takes off.
14 January 2015
The cat genome is out of the bag, and has already helped to pinpoint a gene involved in kidney disease.
Cats may have beaten dogs on the Internet but felines have been a rare breed in genetics labs compared with their canine counterparts. Now, at last, cats are clawing their way into genomics.
At a meeting this week in San Diego, California, a close-knit group of geneticists unveiled the first results from an effort to sequence the genomes of 99 domestic cats. The work will benefit both humans and felines, the researchers say, by mapping the mutations underlying conditions that afflict the two species, such as kidney disease.
“It’s a great time to be in cat genomics,” says William Murphy, a geneticist at Texas A&M University in College Station who is involved in the effort. Plummeting costs for DNA sequencing now make it possible to do genomics cheaply — and cat genomics, long under-funded compared with similar efforts in dogs, is benefiting, he says. “We’re finally at the point where we can do all sorts of things we wanted to do 5 or 10 years ago.”
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