Patagonian sheepdog: Genomic analyses trace the footprints of extinct UK herding dogs to South America

Abstract

Most modern dog breeds were developed within the last two hundred years, following strong and recent human selection based predominantly on aesthetics, with few modern breeds constructed solely to maximize their work potential. In many cases, these working breeds represent the last remnants of now lost populations. The Patagonian sheepdog (PGOD), a rare herding breed, is a remarkable example of such a population. Maintained as an isolated population for over 130 years, the PGOD offers a unique opportunity to understand the genetic relationship amongst modern herding breeds, determine key genomic structure of the founder PGOD populations, and investigate how canine genomic data can mirror human migration patterns. We thus analyzed the population structure of 159 PGOD, comparing them with 1514 dogs representing 175 established breeds. Using 150,069 SNPs from a high-density SNP genotyping array, we establish the genomic composition, ancestry, and genetic diversity of the population, complementing genomic data with the PGOD’s migratory history to South America. Our phylogenetic analysis reveals that PGODs are most closely related to modern herding breeds hailing from the United Kingdom. Admixture models illustrate a greater degree of diversity and genetic heterogeneity within the very small PGOD population than in Western European herding breeds, suggesting the PGOD predates the 200-year-old construction of most pure breeds known today. We thus propose that PGODs originated from the foundational herding dogs of the UK, prior to the Victorian explosion of breeds, and that they are the closest link to a now-extinct population of herding dogs from which modern herding breeds descended.

ManyDogs Project: A Big Team Science Approach to Investigating Canine Behavior and Cognition

“…Chiefly, genetic polymorphisms associated with breed differences in cognitive processes, including inhibitory control, communication, memory, and physical reasoning are starting to be identified and are further reflected in neuroanatomical variation across breeds (Gnanadesikan et al, 2020;Hecht et al, 2019). Tracing canine lineages via modern breed genetics can also, in some instances, be a useful proxy for investigating historic human population movements and associated cultural variation (Barrios et al, 2022;Bergström et al, 2020;Perri et al, 2021). However, fully leveraging modern dog breed diversity as one of the most significant "real-time" multipurpose evolutionary genetics experiments relies on overcoming the limitations of small sample sizes; coordinated data sharing efforts such as ManyDogs can help to achieve this goal.…”

ManyDogs Project: A Big Team Science Approach to Investigating Canine Behavior and Cognition

“…Chiefly, genetic polymorphisms associated with breed differences in cognitive processes, including inhibitory control, communication, memory, and physical reasoning are starting to be identified, and are further reflected in neuroanatomical variation across breeds (Hecht et al, 2019;Gnanadesikan et al, 2020). Tracing canine lineages via modern breed genetics can, in some instances, also be a useful proxy for investigating historic human population movements and associated cultural variation (Bergström et al, 2020;Perri et al, 2021;Barrios et al, 2022). However, fully leveraging modern dog breed diversity as one of the most significant "real-time" multi-purpose evolutionary genetics experiments relies on overcoming the limitations of small sample sizes; coordinated data sharing efforts such as ManyDogs can help to achieve this goal.…”

Balancing at the Borderline of a Breed: A Case Study of the Hungarian Short-Haired Vizsla Dog Breed, Definition of the Breed Profile Using Simple SNP-Based Methods

“…Many of the canine, solely breed-assignment studies were performed by microsatellite markers in spite of the fact that SNPs have found their way to describe structure, admixture, and possible origin of the studied breeds [ 15 , 16 ]. More recent investigations, conducted mainly in cattle as another domestic species, demonstrated that the effectiveness of breed assignment experiments can be enhanced further by selecting only the most informative, so-called breed-informative, SNP-set [ 17 ].…”