Unveiling the Genetic Secrets

Deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly referred to as DNA, is the carrier of genetic information in basically all organisms, and horses are surely no exception. DNA encodes the characteristics of the entire organism.

DNA is actually nothing more than a very long linear chain of so-called nucleotides, which are denoted by the letters A, C, G and T. Their combinations determine the structure of proteins, which are the essence of all living organisms and participate in practically all processes in living bodies.

The set of all DNA in a cell and therefore an organism is called a genome. A horse’s genome is about 2.7 Gb (gigabases), so its written text would be 2,700,000,000 characters long. Modern molecular biological methods make it possible to read the genome of any organism just like you are reading this text. This process is called whole-genome sequencing.

EquineTest offers you the ability to read and store your horse’s DNA sequence forever. You never need to repeat the test because the DNA sequence is basically unchanged.

With EquineTest, you benefit two times:

• First, you can already now and using only a single round of sampling get information about all known genetic traits (markers) of a specific horse. There is no need to analyze for example some mutations of your interest one by one anymore!
• Second, today we can read all the horse’s genome without any problem, but we don’t understand it all. We know what some parts of the horse’s genome mean, how they manifest themselves in a given animal, e.g. some disease or coloration, and this will be duly reported to you but we don’t know at all about others. But it is good to have data at hand for a future analysis.

When you read a more complex text (perhaps not this one :-), everything may not be clear to you immediately after the first reading, sometimes not even after the fifth. The situation is similar with the analysis of the horse genome. If you have your horse’s genome sequence, you have a book that we only partially understand. But thanks to the rapid development of knowledge in this area, we know more and more every year and can return to this “text” and learn new things, such as performance predispositions, in half a year, a year or in five years from now…