Friday Chat w/ Vlad
Hey, it’s Vlad. Crikey it was a busy week at the center. We had guests out doing behavioral testing on us foxes. Dr. Anna Kukekova, who is a professor of molecular genetics from the University of Illinois was among them. She has done some of the seminal work understanding how our genetics makes us Belyaev foxes so special. I actually overheard her speaking to management about some of the techniques she uses to sequence our DNA. Thankfully, just the other day on a trip to the loo, I picked up some reading material to entertain myself during my “quality time”. The books I randomly grabbed were, How to 💩 in the Woods (an environmentally sound approach to a lost art) by Kathleen Meyer, The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America by Matt Kracht and Molecular Genetics for Exceptionally Gifted Foxes. Knowing full well how to 💩 in the woods and already knowing how to identify a dumb bird, I started to read the book on genetics. It was fascinating and enabled me to understand what Dr. Kukekova was talking about.
Once they isolate our DNA they will sequence it on a machine from a company called Pac Bio. For those of you who have not read Molecular Genetics for Exceptionally Gifted Foxes, this means they will determine the order of certain compounds on the DNA strand. This used to be an incredibly laborious process that often had many errors. These new machines make it much faster and more accurate by reading a single molecule of DNA at a time. You can think of DNA in a cell like a pot of cooked spaghetti. Say your pasta noodles have basil, olives, tomatoes, and onions incorporated into them. When you look into the pot all you would see is a scrambled mess of noodles so it would be difficult to tell the order of ingredients on any one noodle. You need to pull a noodle out and stretch it, then you can look at the strand and one by one identify the order of your produce. This is kind of what the Pac Bio machine does to DNA.
Once the scientists know all the information about our DNA 🧬 they can see if they can find any associations between our sequences and our behaviors, hence the testing of our behavior.
Vlad out.