FINLAND-Professor Hannes Lohi

Our research focuses on the canine models of human inherited disorders such as epilepsy, autoimmune disorders and behavioral traits. The dog is a geneticist's dream because each pure breed represents a group of genetically similar animals that descended from only a few ancestors. The presence of hundreds of breeds of dog, each in an isolated breeding population, allows us to simplify a complicated genetic problem. Most breeds have been artificially created by man and this selective breeding has resulted in amazing variation between breeds with respect to weight, size, head shapes, coat, ear shape, behaviors and diseases.

Through aggressive breeding programs man has created over 400 different breeds of dog and burdened them with over 400 inherited diseases during the last 400 years. This places dogs as the species with the second largest number of known genetic diseases, surpassed only by humans. Genetic research in dogs is believed to facilitate the understanding of genetic background of the common complex diseases, which have proven difficult to crack down in human. Additionally, potential gene discoveries will help us to devise DNA markers for breeders to eradicate diseases in breeds.

We have build a growing Dog DNA bank in Finland, which currently includes about 20 000 samples from 240 different breeds of dogs. This will serve as a great resource for many projects we are running in the lab.

This research is funded by many sources including The Academy of Finland, the Sigrid Juselius Foundation, Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Folkhälsan, Canine Health Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, EU's 7th Framework Programme, the University of Helsinki and several breed clubs.

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