In 1925, a handsome male sled dog named Balto led a 13-dog team that braved blizzard conditions during the grueling final 53-mile (85-km) leg of a 674-mile (1,088-km) dogsled relay, bringing lifesaving medicine to the Alaskan city of Nome during a diphtheria outbreak.
Balto was feted as a hero, the subject of books and movies, and the dog's taxidermy mount still stands on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But that was not the end of Balto's magnificent deeds. Scientists have extracted DNA from a piece of Balto's underbelly skin from the well-preserved museum mount and sequenced the dog's genome as part of an ambitious comparative mammalian genomic research project called Zoonomia.
"Balto personifies the strength of the bond between human and dog, and what that bond is capable of," said Katie Moon, a postdoctoral paleogenomics researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and co-lead author of the study published in the journal"Dogs not only offer comfort, support and friendship to humans, but many are actively bred or trained to provide vital services.
The researchers examined Balto's genome as part of a dataset of 682 genomes from modern dogs and wolves and a larger assemblage of 240 mammalian genomes, including humans. Born in 1919, Balto was part of a population of sled dogs imported from Siberia, dubbed Siberian huskies - though the study showed that these dogs differed substantially from modern Siberian huskies. Balto had a body built for strength and not speed, disappointing the breeder, who had the dog neutered.
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