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Know your Horse even better as Horse genome is unlocked

November 6th, 2009

horse-genomeInternational team of scientist from various lab all over the world has been working at decoding the genome of various animals of late, last week, it was reported that the genome of domestic pig has been full decoded, yesterday, it was the turn of the domestic horse.

The new about domestic Horse genome sequencing was announced in the journal of science, it is hoped this break through will help reveal information about how Horse was domesticated. The work reveals similarities between the horse and other bovids – the hoofed group including goats, bison and cattle. Some of the interesting revelation does not end there; the authors also found horses share much of their DNA with humans. Horses suffer from more than 90 hereditary diseases that show similarities to those in humans. It is hoped that studying this hereditary disease in horses could help bring a better understanding to the same diseases in humans.

The horse used in the DNA sequencing was an adult female thoroughbred called Twilight, her DNA revealed a genome that is roughly 2.7 billion nucleotides, in size, the researchers also examined DNA from a variety of other horse breeds including the American quarter horse, Andalusian, Arabian, Belgian draft horse, Hanoverian, Hakkaido, Icelandic horse, Norwegian fjord horse, and Standardbred breeds.

Horses were first domesticated between 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. They have been crucial to transportation, heavy lifting, moving agricultural equipment like plough and so on. Over time, as machines have become the chief sources of agricultural and industrial muscle, those roles have shifted to sport and recreational activities.

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