CanVAS Shannon · Founder

Zik_Zik

Zik_Zik is a Canaan Dog from the Shannon 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 Zik_Zik

Zik_Zik sits near the center of the Canaan Dog cluster - genetically very typical for the breed.

Predicted large by the six body-size genes the atlas reads (IGF1, HMGA2, SMAD2, LCORL, STC2, ADAMTS17).
Carries one copy of the FGF4 chondrodysplasia retrogene.
Wire-coat furnishings - the eyebrow + beard variant at RSPO2.

Zik_Zik's nearest neighbors

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

Zik_Zik's breed

Zik_Zik sits in the German Shepherd cluster, with genome overlap to Golden Retriever, and Labrador 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.

Source

From the CanVAS (Shannon cohort) . Breed-page reference: Canaan Dog.

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	A/A
HMGA2	C/T
SMAD2	G/G
LCORL	G/G
STC2	C/A
ADAMTS17	A/A

Leg length

FGF4·CFA18	T/C
FGF4·CFA12	C/C

Coat

RSPO2	T/T
FGF5	T/C
KRT71	T/C
MC1R	T/C

Ear set

MSRB3

G/A

Skull shape

BMP3	T/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 4.956
y 3.202
z 0.867

PCA-256 distance from breed centroid

22.75

Outlier percentile in breed

lower = more typical

Top-3 principal components by |z|

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

PC26 z = -2.48

chr6:1,658,873 loading 0.0279
chr6:1,741,489 loading 0.0277
chr27:35,211,437 loading -0.0271

PC59 z = -1.60

chr13:17,017,437 loading 0.0335
chr22:61,087,087 loading -0.0324
chr13:7,369,721 loading -0.0313

PC27 z = -1.59

chr12:64,188,765 loading 0.0337
chr23:18,821,315 loading -0.0287
chr4:53,307,196 loading -0.0287

Ancestry reconstruction error: 0.48

Back to the Atlas →