What’s New

Sometimes, especially on warm summer mornings (sense a hint of longing?), I feel like a farmer. Outside doing chores. Watering the deck garden. Caring for the animals. Tending an ancient gene pool. My grandmother and grandfather had an ‘acreage’ before moving to the farm. In those days ‘acreage’ was synonymous with small-time farmer. Big vegetable gardens. Big flower gardens. A chicken coop. Grandma had practical chickens - laying hens, chickens destined for butchering. She also had her Bantee chickens. Small, colorful chickens allowed to roam the acreage during the day. Those chickens often followed grandma while she was tending her gardens. They were her pets.

Hybrid seeds were developed to improve the performance of a crop. Wanting more production, perhaps a more colorful vegetable, a vegetable that would last during shipment, farmers chose hybrid seeds. Fortunately there were people that recognized the importance of preserving - banking - the former seeds. These old-school seeds are often called heritage seeds. With genetic engineering, banking old-school seeds seems even more relevant.  

I found this very interesting..

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (Feb. 26) - A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

More photos and the whole story.

Genetics and the Shape of Dogs

Click on the Westie (West Highland White Terrier) to read about how research communities, human and veterinary, work together to enhance lives.

C.A. Sharp, the author of this piece Vickie shared with me and numerous other great articles, participated on Dr. John Armstrong’s genetics list. She starts this article with a quote from Hellmuth Wachtel Ph.D., another participant on that most excellent list (which has been defunct basically since the death of Dr. Armstrong). Hellmuth, a zoologist, not a dog breeder, is quite radical in his views. However, he, along with several other participants with ‘out-of-the-box’ views, are the people that indirectly gave me the courage to take on the Gompa dog project. C.A. is self-taught, extremely intelligent, has co-authored some scientific pieces with researchers and breeds Australian Shepherds. She is generous with sharing her many excellent articles. You can find read more of her articles, along with other articles along similar lines on the Genetics page of the FFT website.

The following is taken from a private post to a fellow breeder and I’m using it as an intro for a post I’ve had sitting, unpublished.

The RD test… Genetics… It’s all fascinating and the more I learn, the less I know! Have you heard of the epigenome? Nova featured a piece on identical twins and how useful they are to researchers. Same DNA, but often one will manifest a disease and the other doesn’t. Why was the subject of the piece. There were also mice that were littermates; clones actually. I think some were knock-out mice. That’s when researchers actually remove gene/s.. Anyway, it was amazing. The epigenome spirals around the DNA and regulates it with tags, telling the DNA to be a heart cell, etc. or to turn off or on and other things I probably didn’t catch. The epigenome is directly affected by nutrition, environmental factors (and surely hormones, etc. that continually flow through our bodies). And the epigenome is hereditary, including the changes! Wow! Consider that!

Defintion of epigenome

Whew! Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny