An international team of researchers has decoded the genome of the domestic horse, Equus caballus, revealing a genome structure with remarkable similarities to humans.
And it has more than one million genetic differences across a variety of horse breeds, according to an announcement from the Broad Institute, a component of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
In addition to shedding light on a key part of the mammalian branch of the evolutionary tree, the work also provides a critical starting point for mapping disease genes in horses.
"Horses and humans suffer from similar illnesses, so identifying the genetic culprits in horses promises to deepen our knowledge of disease in both organisms," said senior author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, scientific director of vertebrate genome biology at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a professor of comparative genomics at Uppsala University in Sweden.
"The horse genome sequence is a key enabling resource toward this goal."
The analysis was published in the journal Science.
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