Salina Journal
LINDSBORG -- How would your dog like to go for a ride?
And slobber for science?
It will have the opportunity to do both Thursday at Bethany College, where a visiting Swedish professor will collect genetic samples of local dogs to add to his worldwide collection.
Peter Savolainen, an assistant professor at the Royal Institute in Stockholm, has for the past several years been using genetics to trace the ancestry of modern dogs, with his work published in scientific journals such as Molecular Biology and Evolution and chronicled in National Geographic and the New York Times in recent months.
Modern dogs, his research shows, sprung from a relatively small population of wolves in southern China between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago.
He came to that conclusion after studying a particular type of DNA -- called mitochondrial DNA -- that is passed nearly unchanged from mother to child. Because it doesn't represent a mix of the DNA from both parents, it's been used in recent years to track genealogy and origins, as well; the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve," traced to east Africa roughly 200,000 years ago, and said to be the mother of all modern humans, was found using the same techniques.
He's scheduled to talk about "Genetic Studies Unveiling the Origins of Dogs" at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Lindquist Hall on the Bethany campus.
"Think about it like this," Savolainen said Thursday. "There's just one origin of dogs from wolves. If there were 10 wolves that were domesticated, there's 10 types (of mitochondrial DNA), and so all dogs would start with those 10 types."
As dogs spread out from that initial point, Savolainen said, "there's very little chance that all 10 types would travel all over the world -- maybe just one to Europe."
And so the descendants of those original 10 dogs would fan out over the globe, but with descendants of different types generally moving in different directions; types 3, 4 and 7, for example, might have tended to head west to Europe, while types 2, 5 and 9 headed for India, and types 1 and 10 went north and across to North America.
"By mere chance, it's impossible that all 10 would end up all over the world," Savolainen said. "The farther you go (from where dogs originated), the less difference you'll find. But in the region of origin, you'll find all ten."
And, he said, "That's what we found in southern China and southeast Asia."
"It's 'out of Africa' for humans, and 'out of China' for dogs," he said.
Savolainen has gathered samples from more than 4,000 dogs, "from more or less every corner of the world, but very few from North America ... North America is open on the map to us."
Savolainen doubts he'll turn up anything new in the samples from central Kansas.
"It will be hard, looking at people's pet dogs today," he said. "They are basically European dogs from a few hundred years ago. We expect them to be a little different, but we don't have the samples."
He added that he might see some differences, because of the indigenous dogs that lived with the American Indians before European colonization.
Any dog is welcome, Savolainen said. The sampling will start at 3 p.m. Thursday, outside the Nelson Science Center on campus.
The sampling will consist of a quick and painless swabbing of the dogs' mouths, Savolainen said, "like what the Swedish police do all the time."
Savolainen began studying doggy DNA when asked to help the Swedish police solve a series of murders, where one of the few pieces of evidence was dog hair on the corpses.
Asked the practical uses of his research into dog origins, Savolainen chuckled: "I would say it's totally useless."
But then he pauses for a second, and adds, "It's history, and my interest is history. In a way, there's some use to it -- it tells us the genetic background of dogs, which can be useful to veterinary medicine."
Besides that, he said, it can be easier to find a particular disease-causing gene in dogs than in humans -- but that once isolated in dogs, researchers know what to look for in human genes.
n Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by e-mail at mstrand@salina.com.
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