Stage 3

When stage 2 yielded no results we attempted to find a lab who would work with our team.

During this time I was contacted by Louise Gustafsson, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences "Animal Genetics" as she requested some dogs already merle tested with Tilia so that they could do their own comparison testing. I arranged for the dogs and then realized that this is the same lab where Göran Andersson works. Göran worked on the MITF research along with Leif Andersson https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4130573/
I sent Louise all the info we had so far on whitehead research and she was to forward it all to Göran. It would have worked out perfectly, considering he was part of the research into Piebald I assumed he would like to continue it looking for Whitehead, unfortunately I never heard back.

In the meantime Yuri had being reaching out to colleagues that he works with and Prof. Dr. Tosso Leeb from the Institute of Genetics – Bern University in Switzerland has great interest in canine coat color genetics.

Prof. Leeb requested blood samples from a family of dogs for further WGS testing – sire, dam and offspring. We supplied him with the choice of two families for consideration and he choose this Pembroke Welsh Corgi family. 

Litter owner - Janine Leggitt of Lockewood Corgis organized the collection and shipping of blood samples from sire, dam, 3 offspring and an ancestor in common found on both sides of the pedigree.
The blood arrived at Bern University on Feb, 19th and passed all quality control tests!

Prof. Dr. Tosso Leeb and Jana Grešová, a PhD student, will now begin the Whole Genome Sequencing analyzation.The WGS data will be collaboratively examined with our original data analyst team of

• Prof. Yuri Tani Utsunomiya, DVM, MSc, PhD
• Rafaela Beatriz Pintor Torrecilha DVM, MSc, PhD
• Marco Milanesi PhD
  

and also compared to WGS data we have on Finn and Clover from stage 2 of research.