Buy a six pack of Redbull and get to work on this!

Article behind pay firewall:

So many doggone traits: mapping genetics of multiple phenotypes in the domestic dog

:yelrotflm:lol tears

I am going to need at least a week to get through that link.. And a bottle of wine too:D

Ooooh, thank you. Summer reading! :)

No kidding. And besides, sleep is overrated and who needs food - it's only fattening! If you work straight through, answers can just pour forth in no time! :D

Do you know how I can get the article? It won't email it to me. I use yahoo and can't set it up as a default in my Windows 7 for some reason. Waaa!

I poked around and now it's saying I can rent it and I tried the 5 min. version which it denied saying no auth. from publisher instead of letting me read. Is there no way to read it but to pay for it?

I saw there apparently is a recessive gene for short hair in the Havanese, but since the Yorkshire Terrier has a rather unique gene for silk hair, is it not possible that the Havanese has a unique recessive gene for short hair? However, from reading those articles, it appears that the Havanese breeders were surprised by the appearance of short hair in their pups, which presents some possible questions as well.

But...

Did I miss the post and/or article that states that there definitely exists in the Yorkshire Terrier breed a recessive gene for short hair that might have been expressed in Minnie?

I ask because this is the first mention I have ever heard of a short hair (recessive) Yorkshire Terrier, and considering that this forum has had several recent mentions of "blue born" Yorkies...a recessive attribute, coupled with all the mentions of Yorkshire Terriers rescued from BYB's, puppy mills, pet stores, and animal center/rescue organizations...and all the other "badly bred" Yorkies, I must admit I find it surprising that this is the first mention of a "short hair (recessive) Yorkie" outside the hair growth patterns of the "red legged" Yorkie. Would that not be a fairly 'monumental' discovery?

I can access the article on Monday and copy and paste sections here under "fair use" policy--that means that we will have to analyze, comment, and critique it ;).

On Monday, PM me your email address and I will email you a free PDF copy of the article.

Oh, no thanks, that is more than sweet but I think I put you in a bad position and I'm sorry. I would not ask you to do that, provide me a free version of what they charge to read. I'd thought that even if behind a firewall it was okay for all interested parties to read this since they had allowed renting for free and that I was just doing something wrong in how I was trying to access it - clicking on the wrong thing or something. Don't you worry about it - I'll read those other article links you so kindly provided.

This MARS test result has quite unsettled me and unless that lab is just truly producing a very faulty product and passing it off as a reliable test for breed determination, I would love to know more about how likely a very atypical pup, both coat-wise and conformation-wise, is to come from purebred Yorkies whose lines from both sides have always closely adhered to the breed standard.

All breeds of dogs are still dogs, and carry the same genetic loci (genes, or protein-coding DNA sequences at specific locations on the chromosomes). What makes each breed unique is the differences in DNA sequence at these genetic loci. So Yorkies definitely carry the dominant long hair allele at the Havanese genetic locus. All it would take to get a recessive short-haired Yorkie is a mutation of the Havanese gene from dominant long-hair to recessive short-hair, for that mutation to be passed on to offspring, who are then carriers, and then to breed a carrier with another carrier so you get a homozygous (two copies of the mutant gene) short-haired Yorkie. I don't know whether such a discovery would be "monumental"--I think that breeders would be upset and try to eliminate it from their breeding stock. It may even have already taken place. There are other Yorkietalk threads on short hair Yorkies where people have said they have seen Yorkies that look like regular Yorkies except for having short hair. I don't know whether this is what happened in Minnie's case--the only way to find out would be by genetic testing. There is supposedly a genetic test for the Havanese short hair mutant gene, but I don't know how good the test is. I've read of the gene being called the "furnishings" gene, or "RSPO2" gene, but that information was in an informal article, not a research article, so I don't know how accurate that information is.

I think that the article behind the pay firewall is a review article that summarizes the research in the other full articles that I was able to link to--I'll know more on Monday when I get a chance to read it myself--so maybe you're not missing out on anything. At any rate, I'll let you know. If the truth be told, people email articles back and forth to each other all the time--the publisher just doesn't want people to make a habit of it. Those other articles will definitely make for summer reading, and if you finish reading them before me, you'll know more than I do and be able to explain it to me ;).

I think that the safest thing we can say about the MARS test is that it can tell if a dog is at least 90% purebred Yorkie, but it can't tell you whether a particular dog adheres to breed standards. And don't forget the photo of Minnie's mother--she didn't look like she adhered to breed standards anyway.

Well, I'll read those articles and they will likely give me as much information as I can understand without going into great depth. But I would so like to understand far more than I do about genetics in dogs. It's fascinating how they can vary so much compared to other species and how so many Yorkies favor and yet many others do not.