Dogs offer a valuable model for aging research due to genetic homogeneity within breeds and broad genetic variation across breeds and mixed breeds.

“the environmental part of this I think is probably the most important from a what are we going to learn from dogs that we can't learn from mice perspective as you said dogs really share our environment to a greater extent than any other animal maybe with the exception of cats”

“dogs have some of that same genetic homogeneity if you look within individual purebred breeds but we also have many purebred breeds that are widely divergent both genetically and morphologically all you have to do is look at a chihuahua on a great day and write to see that divergence but we also have this really interesting and complex mixed breed population there's a combination of all these different genetic variants that each breed has”

“so they're a very powerful animal in which to understand aging and test interventions for that reason and you can do it in a time frame that's that's you know feasible”

“dogs share the human environment is another big one right and that's that's for me one of the most important because we cannot model that in the laboratory in fact we do exactly the opposite we really try to limit variation in environment to extreme measures dogs share our environment with the exception of diet share almost all aspects of the of the human environment and so that's a a bridge in some ways between laboratory studies and human studies”

“how working with companion dogs offers many advantages over working in mice beginning with some of the obvious like they're”

“so they've got this really interesting and powerful genetic architecture we have a couple hundred purebred breeds of dogs which you can almost think of as inbred strains right and then on top of that we have this mixed breed population and that's coupled with with phenotypic diversity so for almost any trait that you think about dogs are more diverse than people are”

“well first of all they're a heck of a lot closer to humans than than mice are but they're also not genetically in the way mice are they live in our environment not a sterile environment um they consume you know food that probably looks a little bit more uh like the food we would consume at least in some cases”

“well first of all they're a heck of a lot closer to humans than than mice are but they're also not genetically inbred the way mice are they live in our environment not a sterile environment they consume you know food that probably looks a little bit more like the food we would consume at least in some cases”