Hero

Nala

Hero 979 of 3,197 · GRLS Main Cohort

A Sequenced Founder from the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, a multi-decade Morris Animal Foundation research project tracking the health and longevity of 3,000+ Golden Retrievers from puppyhood through their full lives.

How this Hero helps the atlas

More genetically distinct than 82% of dogs in the atlas

This dog occupies an unusual position in canine genetic space, the mean distance to their nearest 100 neighbors places them in the 82.8th percentile of genetic uniqueness. Their data adds resolution to a less-explored region of 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].

Atlas profile

Uniqueness

83th

percentile across 14,478 dogs

Position in breed

79th

percentile from breed centroid

Nearest-100 distance

42.71

mean PCA-256 Euclidean

Closest neighbors in the atlas

Is this your dog?

Is this your dog? If you were part of the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, you can claim this page and give your Hero their real name.

The claim flow opens shortly. If you're a GRLS owner who wants to claim a Hero now, email [email protected].

Source

Genotype from the CanVAS aggregated variant atlas (Brundage et al. 2026). Cohort membership from the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (Morris Animal Foundation). The CanVAS GRLS subset (n=3,197) joins the AWS GRLS PLINK dataset by exact IID match with no translation layer.