Genetic Diversity of Italian Dog Breeds

Blood samples from 256 dogs and seven Apennine wolves (Table 1) were collected following the European Rules for Animal Welfare when collected in Italy and approved National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Animal Care and Use Committee protocols when collected or received in the United States. The dog populations represent 23 breeds or varieties of historical Italian origin. The ENCI recognizes 13 of these populations as purebreeds and nine of which are also recognized by the AKC. Ten populations are termed “varieties,” and represent regional homogeneous populations, generally managed by informal registries and maintained by owners for specific behavioral applications. Three breeds, the Cane Corso, Italian Greyhound, and Neapolitan Mastiff, were sampled from Italian populations to compliment a preexisting collection of American populations of the same breeds. Animals selected for analysis were as distantly related as possible based on pedigree information from ENCI. DNA extraction was performed with the commercial Qiagen DNeasy Blood & Tissue Kit. Samples were genotyped on the Illumina CanineHD bead chip (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA), which contains 172,115 potential markers, in the Ostrander laboratory at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, USA) using manufacturer's recommended protocols.
Genotyped samples were merged with a larger dataset of 1,346 dogs representing 161 breeds (described in (Parker et al., 2017)) and publically available genotypes from five New Guinea Singing Dogs and three Catahoula Leopard Dogs (Hayward et al., 2016) to produce a dataset of 1,609 dogs representing 182 breeds, seven Apennine wolves, seven global Grey wolf representatives, and two Golden Jackals.