CanVAS Spatola · Founder

GSD_GSD_004181

GSD_GSD_004181 is a German Shepherd from the Spatola research cohort. One of 14,478 dogs who built the atlas.

About this name and portrait

I'm sure you probably guessed by now. These aren't real pictures of these dogs. And these aren't their real names.

But these dogs were real. They were alive. They were loved. We thought they deserved more than a subject ID to be remembered by. The portraits are built from each dog's actual genome, so we tried to get it close. But it's not enough.

We want to see your dog's face. We want to celebrate them by the name they were loved by. We want to look back and say 'oh yeah, Bosco? The Dachshund-Corgi mix? I remember him, his FGF4 variant was wild, those little legs could hold a small house.'

These dogs gave something most people don't realize. The Heroes in the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study showed up for blood draws, health surveys, fur and nail samples, every single year. Some of them for 14 years. Their data has taught us about lymphoma, hemangiosarcoma, and aging in ways that help not just dogs but potentially humans. And they didn't ask for any of it.

Morris Animal Foundation calls them Heroes. We agree.

If your dog was part of any of these studies, we want to give you their page. Their real name. Their real photo. The recognition they earned.

Email [email protected].

About GSD_GSD_004181

GSD_GSD_004181 is a strong genetic outlier within the German Shepherd cluster - among the most distinctive examples of their breed.

Predicted giant by the six body-size genes the atlas reads (IGF1, HMGA2, SMAD2, LCORL, STC2, ADAMTS17).
Standard leg length. No chondrodysplasia retrogene variant.

GSD_GSD_004181's nearest neighbors

The five dogs in the atlas whose genomes sit closest to GSD_GSD_004181's. Click any of them to keep exploring.

GSD_GSD_004181's breed

GSD_GSD_004181 sits in the German Shepherd cluster, with genome overlap to Golden Retriever - sister breeds nearby in the atlas.

Breed similarity from non-negative least squares against 91 breed centroids in PCA-256 space, corrected for atlas sample-size imbalance. Without correction, Goldens (22% of the atlas) leak into every dog's raw NNLS breakdown; with it, the bias falls out. Raw fractions stay in the dataset for re-derivation. Methodology.

German Shepherd 92%
Golden Retriever 8%

Source

From the CanVAS (Spatola cohort) . Breed-page reference: German Shepherd.

Full genotype detail

click to expand

The actual allele call at each locus's representative SNP for this dog. Each gene name links to its page where you can see the per-breed frequency table and the direction of effect.

Body size

IGF1	–
HMGA2	C/C
SMAD2	G/G
LCORL	A/A
STC2	–
ADAMTS17	G/A

Leg length

FGF4·CFA18	C/C
FGF4·CFA12	C/C

Coat

RSPO2	–
FGF5	T/C
KRT71	T/C
MC1R	C/C

Ear set

MSRB3

–

Skull shape

BMP3	C/T
SMOC2	A/G

Technical details

click to expand

The numbers behind the placement. Useful for researchers reproducing the math or debugging an unexpected position; not interesting to most readers.

UMAP-3D position

x 5.655
y 3.784
z -1.604

PCA-256 distance from breed centroid

53.44

Outlier percentile in breed

lower = more typical

Top-3 principal components by |z|

The 3 PCs on which GSD_GSD_004181 scores most extreme, with the 3 highest-loading SNPs on each. Foundation for the future genome-ring visualization.

PC78 z = 4.73

chr22:2,157,682 loading 0.0351
chr22:2,473,315 loading 0.0335
chr22:2,367,358 loading 0.0330

PC102 z = 3.26

chr6:44,418,248 loading 0.0371
chr21:24,347,827 loading 0.0363
chr13:28,713,034 loading 0.0324

PC165 z = -2.56

chr28:1,791,942 loading 0.0385
chr19:1,685,081 loading -0.0372
chr28:2,607,542 loading -0.0344

Ancestry reconstruction error: 0.49

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