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Thai Ridgeback

Lifespan
No cited life expectancy for this breed has been read in yet.
Most carried variant
No carrier testing data for this breed has been read in yet.
Behind this page
21 dogs
in the atlas · an early sketch

No carrier testing data for Thai Ridgebacks has been read in yet. 21 dogs stand behind the atlas figures here, so treat this page as an early sketch.

Thai Ridgeback
Photo: HiSa Hiller, Schweiz · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia

Also known as Mah Thai and Thai Ridgeback Dog.

Names & origins

Other names

The Thai Ridgeback is also recorded as Mah Thai and Thai Ridgeback Dog.

Identified as Thai Ridgeback (VBO:0201348) in the Vertebrate Breed Ontology (Mullen et al. 2025, CC-BY 4.0) · registry IDs FCI 338 · iDog 241 · VeNom 14635.

For researchers Population genetics, disease models and every recorded condition Open the research detail for the Thai Ridgeback
What the atlas says about Thai Ridgeback

In the atlas, the Thai Ridgeback clusters consistently as Thai Ridgeback (100% of the 21 dogs here). Genetic diversity is high (mean heterozygosity 0.3681), reflecting either a mixed-breed cluster or breeds with broad genetic backgrounds.

Ranks 96 of 107 on the bottleneck severity scale, in the upper quartile of genetic diversity. Mean heterozygosity is 0.368, notably high, indicates broad genetic background. High breed predictability score (1.42), individual dogs of this breed reliably cluster together genetically. Only 21 dogs of this breed in the atlas, modestly sampled.

Genetic dimensions · CanVAS atlas

What the atlas genotypes say about Thai Ridgeback

Computed from the 14,478 CanVAS dogs in the Atlas, on an imputed genotype backbone: 77,215 directly typed sites per dog, imputed to 9.67 million variants.

The confidence below counts dogs, not reads: it is the size of the sample, and it is separate from how the genotypes were measured.

Dogs in the Atlas
21Founders
21 from Spatola
Genetic diversity
0.37Diverse
Mean heterozygosity across the breed. 12th most diverse of 107 ranked populations.
What does genetic diversity mean?

How varied a breed's gene pool is — the share of gene spots where a typical dog of the breed carries two different versions rather than two identical ones.

How to read it: Higher = more diverse. Among well-sampled breeds it ranges roughly 0.22 (least diverse) to 0.33 (most diverse).

Diversity is a strength, not a verdict on any individual dog. Lower diversity means it's worth paying attention to recessive-risk testing — not that a dog is doomed.

Cluster structure
Single tight cluster
Intra-breed RMS distance: 20.45
What does within-breed variation mean?

How much individual dogs within the breed differ from each other genetically.

How to read it: Higher = more internal variety among individuals of the breed.

Sensitive to how many dogs of the breed we've sampled.

Related breeds
In the Other group
Explore the full lineage map →
VBO foundation stock (breeding records) · AKC breed group
Relatedness is documented lineage + kennel family. Genetic-ancestry distance measures diversity, not kinship, so it isn't used here.
n = 21 dogs · moderate sample · CanVAS (Brundage 2026) · Sniff Atlas
A gift to human medicine

Thai Ridgebacks are a natural model for human disease

Because the same genes cause the same conditions across species, the inherited conditions documented in Thai Ridgebacks help researchers understand, and work toward treating, the human diseases they model. This is the dog advancing human medicine. The breed models the human disease; it does not have it, and this is not a prediction for your dog.

Human equivalents via OMIA → Mondo / OMIM. Model-of, not identity. The named gene is the canine locus, not a claim that a pet has the human disease.
Documented in OMIA

Every condition recorded in the Thai Ridgeback

Beyond the testable carriers above, OMIA's literature catalogue records 2 genetic conditions in the Thai Ridgeback, 1 of which have a known human equivalent. This is the documented landscape across all Thai Ridgebacks ever studied, not a prediction for any one dog.

Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals (OMIA); Nicholas, Tammen & Sydney Informatics Hub, DOI 10.25910/2AMR-PV70
Documented in the breed's literature is not carrier status and not a forecast for an individual dog. Human equivalents are mapped via Mondo/OMIM. Carrier frequencies (above) are the separately-measured testable subset (Donner 2023).
The data behind this page

Where every number on this page came from.

This page draws on three primary data sources. Carrier frequencies for the Mendelian section come from Donner et al. 2023 (CC-BY-4.0). We grade these data at evidence Limited because the cohort is a direct-to-consumer ascertainment, which biases toward owners who chose to test their dogs. The panel also uses tag-SNP proxies for some variants rather than direct causal-variant assays. Limited is a study-design grade, not a quality grade: the Donner cohort is the largest open canine-genotype dataset in existence and we are grateful for it. We rate the confounding MEDIUM.

Population-genetic dimensions (heterozygosity, intra-breed PCA distance, nearest neighbors, trait-locus frequencies) come from CanVAS (Brundage 2026), harmonized through the Sniff Atlas. The exact release date and verification commit are pinned at the bottom of the page so a researcher can trace a number back to a specific snapshot. The disease-gene-variant graph comes from OMIA (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals; Nicholas, Tammen, and the Sydney Informatics Hub at the Sydney School of Veterinary Science, The University of Sydney; retrieved April 2026, DOI 10.25910/2AMR-PV70).

What this page does not yet have. Inheritance modes and per-disease penetrance evidence from Donner 2023 are in the structured data for every variant the panel covers. Mondo, OMIM, Ensembl, and HGNC cross-references live on the gene and disease pages this page links to, rather than being repeated here. What is still absent from this breed page is anything not in the cited panel, and each such gap carries its cause where it appears.

How to cite this page. The computed dimensions on this page are derived from the open Sniff Atlas v1.0.1 (Gehring 2026, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20566358, CC-BY 4.0). Full citation formats including BibTeX, RIS, and CITATION.cff at sniff.world/cite.

Some things about living with a thai ridgeback never make it into a database. Add what you know as a Keeper, in your words →

Lived experience, kept beside the science.
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Every thai ridgeback added sharpens the breed's genetic neighborhood. Enrollment is free. The data stays open. The star is permanent.

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References
  1. Donner J, Freyer J, Davison S, Anderson H, Blades M, Honkanen L, et al. (2023). Genetic prevalence and clinical relevance of canine Mendelian disease variants in over one million dogs. PLOS Genetics 19(2):e1010651. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1010651
  2. Brundage DM (2026). CanVAS: A Harmonized and Imputed Canine Variant Atlas. bioRxiv. doi:10.64898/2026.04.13.718238
  3. Nicholas, F.W., Tammen, I., & Sydney Informatics Hub. (2026). Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals (OMIA) [dataset]. The University of Sydney. https://omia.org. doi:10.25910/2AMR-PV70 (retrieved April 2026).
Last updated
Sources: CanVAS (Brundage 2026) · Donner 2023 · OMIA