However popular, useful and abundant they are, dogs hold many mysteries. For one thing, just how did they come to be? Clive Wynne has been traveling the world to re-examine evidence supporting two dominant ideas: the “hunter’s helper” and “dumpster diver” theories. Wynne, who conducts behavioral research with both dogs and wolves, focuses on such issues as how the first dogs achieved the reproductive isolation needed to create a canid subspecies. Behavioral and genetic details revealed by recent research on dogs and wolves, he says, call for revising the story of this “obligatory symbiont.” It's likely the ancestors of dogs effectively domesticated themselves, jolted along their way by genetic accident.

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Matthew Breen knows the source of the cancers common in purebred dogs: people. As we bred dogs for behavioral and appearance traits, humans unwittingly selected for susceptibility to maladies including retinal atrophy, hip dysplasia and certain cancers. But genomic studies have revealed a silver lining: Research on these inbred populations can radically accelerate progress on cancers shared by humans and their loyal companions. By looking at 150 dogs with lymphoma, Breen and colleagues identified a genetic signature that predicts how long a dog will respond to chemotherapy. The same signature, found in corresponding regions of the human genome, might also help doctors refine the prognosis for human lymphoma patients. There is so much genetic diversity in humans that locating it otherwise would have taken many years. Breen is working with breeders to reduce defective genes from kennel populations in a controlled and effective way, while collaborating with labs seeking clues to human cancer. “Within [the canine] genome,” he says, “we’re starting to find the answers we’ve been looking for in our own genome for 50 years.”

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After decades of effort, gene therapy is happening: In November 2012, the European Commission approved a viral gene therapy for a rare metabolic syndrome causing pancreatitis, while clinical trials are well under way for a treatment for a rare form of blindness. Both therapies use adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) as a vector for delivering genes to the cell nucleus. But the pursuit of viral vectors for gene therapy and the battle against pathogenic viruses are both hampered by the subtle shape-shifting of viruses and the immune system’s equally dynamic response to them. Mavis Agbandje-McKenna will describe what structural virologists are doing to understand how AAVs recognize cell-surface receptors, traffic genes into the cell, fend off antibodies and then release and replicate in the nucleus.

For more information, see the CASW website.