Move over, lab rats. Your contrived maze-running and wheel-spinning experiments are so 20th-century.
A bigger, more comprehensive form of translational research, involving sequencing the DNA of thousands of pet dogs to learn about canine and human behavior and health, is underway in a project conducted by University of Massachusetts Medical School scientists and the Broad Institute in Cambridge.
Darwin’s Dogs, the name of the multifaceted citizen-science study of dog genetics, has enrolled 14,712 pups as of last week, according to lead researcher Elinor K. Karlsson.
Ms. Karlsson, who has a doctorate in bioinformatics, is an assistant professor of bioinformatics and integrative biology at the medical school and director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She has directed the Karlsson Lab at UMass since 2014.
“From a scientific point of view, dogs have incredible range of behavior,” Ms. Karlsson said. “We know these differences in behavior have something to do with their genes.”
The study focuses on how genetics shape behavior and how changes in DNA, the chemical building blocks of genes, alter behavior.
Dogs exhibit many of the same psychiatric disorders as humans, including anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior, according to Ms. Karlsson. They’ve been treated for the past few decades with the same antidepressants and other drugs used for humans, too.
“The drugs work just as badly in dogs as in people,” she said.
So by looking at the DNA of a large number of dogs, and connecting that to differences in behavior, researchers hope to precisely target what’s gone wrong.
Psychiatric disorders aren’t the only outcomes the researchers are looking at. Data are being gathered about dogs’ food allergies and cognitive impairment, and will soon look at the genetics of cancer, among other conditions.
So why take data gathering out of the lab and into the hands of thousands of pet-loving volunteers?
“People know their dogs,” Ms. Karlsson said, and an animal’s natural, or at least domesticated environment, gives a more reliable picture of behavior than the artificial setup of a lab.
Volunteers joined the study, and can still join, through the project’s website, darwinsdogs.org. They are asked to complete several ongoing questionnaires about their pet and are given a kit with which to collect and submit saliva for DNA analysis.
The website includes extensive information about the project in blogs that are written by the research team and in community forum discussions.
Medical researchers teamed up with animal behavior experts from the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants to develop measures dog-owners could assess.
The measures were intended to be things that differed among breeds, were easy to observe and wouldn’t be influenced much by human cues, thereby reflecting more the dogs’ innate traits.
A handful of the first group of Worcester participants met monthly last year in “Woofster” meet-ups, where participants practiced interactive exercises with their dogs, which they recorded and scored, to see how reliably they could detect key behaviors.
Participants might look at such things as whether the right or left paw is dominant, how a dog reacts to a moving toy or how it searches for a hidden treat.
“The challenge is learning to ask the right question,” said Ms. Karlsson.
Jack O’Lantern, an 8-year-old half-Yorkshire terrier, half-poodle, owned by Jean J. Hearns of Worcester, was a willing subject for the Worcester Woofster meetings.
Ms. Hearns, who joined Darwin’s Dogs after she had participated in a dog-walking study at UMass, learned a lot about Jack’s behavior.
“He basically flunked everything,” Ms. Hearns said, jokingly.
Unlike most other dogs, Jack seemed indifferent to tests involving deer urine or citronella, strong scents most dogs react to.
The search for a treat under an overturned flowerpot didn’t rouse him in the least.
Ms. Hearns, an administrative assistant at Clark University, said she and the dog behavior experts concluded Jack likely lacked a sense of smell.
Ms. Hearns explained that not being able to rely on scent may explain some of Jack’s unusual behavior, such as not liking people who are bald or wearing hats, because he relies on visual cues such as hackles, or hair, raised to signal danger.
He also doesn’t like metal-on-metal sounds, including the sounds of cooking, because all he hears is clanging and doesn’t associate it with the smell of food.
Ms. Hearns said, “He’s just adapted differently.”
She said she goes to the Darwin's Dogs website every month to keep up with the study.
“It’s the greatest thing because it helps behaviorally with him,” she said.
Karen McGahie, an actuary from Boylston, said she’s enjoyed participating in the sessions with her 5 ½-year-old vizsla, Rusty. But she was hoping to get some more feedback from researchers.
Ms. Karlsson said one of the biggest struggles in the two years the study has been running has been keeping up with the influx of participating dogs, combined with the vagaries of funding and protocols for analyzing DNA and reporting the results in meaningful ways. Genetic results for the first group of subjects are due out soon.
Researchers had initially anticipated getting perhaps 1,000 participants, a fraction of the current amount.
Although getting genetic information back to owners has been slower than expected, Ms. Karlsson said the information provided by the participants is valuable. The team is looking at other options, such as voluntary contributions to defray the cost, to speed up the DNA analyses.
“The more dogs we can get involved in the project, the more we’re going to learn,” she said.
Still, Ms. McGahie said, “it was interesting to see the different reactions of the dogs.”
Rusty was also randomly selected to be one of the first three DNA test subjects, in which he was genetically determined to be 100 percent purebred.
“It never occurred to me it could be otherwise,” Ms. McGahie said. “He’s AKC registered. They give you papers.”
According to researchers, many so-called purebred dogs’ genes tell another story.
Ms. Karlsson said a lot of time was spent looking at purebred dogs to distill pure genetic traits. But nobody had ever sequenced the genome of a mixed-breed dog.
So another substudy of Darwin’s Dogs, called Mendel’s Mutts, sequenced the genome of 21 mixed-breed dogs. The study matches the mutts to the genomes of 21 known purebreds, such as Rusty, to identify what portion of a dog’s DNA matches known breeds.
“They’re even more mixed-up than I expected them to be,” Ms. Karlsson said.
A terrier-mix named Ramekin, for example, had genetic traces of 20 identifiable breeds, plus a large portion of unidentifiable DNA. His ancestry includes boxer, Labrador retriever, poodle, Jack Russell terrier and rottweiler, to name a few.
Emily Peterson, a veterinary student in Grafton, with a master’s degree in behavioral neuroscience, found that even with her academic background, she’s gained some insights into the behavior of her dog, Banksy, an 8-year-old male English springer spaniel.
In one of the Woofster activities designed to look for hunting and prey-drive behavior, Banksy didn’t react to the setup except for being extremely interested in the laser pointer.
“It was just interesting to see what he reacted to and what he didn’t,” Ms. Peterson said. “It makes me think about how he acts in different situations.”
Ms. Peterson got so involved with the project, she volunteered in a related citizen science study of ticks, which she picks off her dog and sends to UMass for study.
The tick-picking task was a bit “disturbing,” she said, but she willingly does it because “it’s for science.”
Ms. Karlsson said she hoped soon to launch an umbrella project, called Darwin’s Ark, for Darwin’s Dogs and its offshoot studies, the tick study and possibly a citizen-science genetics study involving cats.
“It’s going to take a while, but this is a start,” she said about the task of collecting and combing through thousands of animals’ genetic, health and behavioral data.
And while the research team is trained first as scientists, they’ve found an equally important role in conducting citizen science is managing social media.
“It’s a fun challenge to find a way to work with people that they feel they’re part of the project,” Ms. Karlsson said.