The Siberian husky Balto saved a town from a diphtheria outbreak. Now he's helping reveal the genetics of working dogs, 90 years after his death.
Balto and his canine compatriots were shipped to Cleveland, Ohio, in March 1927, where they were given a parade and brought to the Brookside Zoo. Balto was framed in the media as the lead dog—a controversial claim today—and was honored with awards and even a statue in Manhattan’s Central Park.
Balto died in 1933, and his body was preserved and mounted at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where it resides to this day. Enter the geneticists, who plucked tissue from the 90-year-old remains, extracted DNA, and used that DNA to sequence the dog’s genome.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the team found that Balto was a more genetically diverse animal than modern huskies. But he is also genetically divergent from modern sled dogs.
, Balto’s genome included variants that may have helped him and his ilk endure the harsh conditions of the subarctic.“Balto had variants in genes related to things like weight, coordination, joint formation, and skin thickness, which you would expect for a dog bred to run in that environment,” Moon said.The interrogation of Balto’s genome, along with those of 682 other dogs and wolves, vastly expands scientists’ understanding of canid diversity over time.
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