Genome Wide Association Studies for Identification of Candidate Risk Factors for Juvenile Onset of Demodicosis Disease

Abstract

Genome wide association Studies (GWAS) are an efficient approach to estimate the candidate risk loci associated with complex diseases. Juvenile onset of canine demodicosis is a common inflammatory disease of the skin of dogs. It is severely invasive and even fatal in some cases. Suppression of immune response as an underlying cause of infestation of demodicosis is well established. Genetic causes of the disease are yet unknown. Therefore, this thesis focuses on identifying the candidate single nucleotide polymorphic risk loci associated with juvenile onset of canine demodicosis through GWAS. Ten candidate SNPs were successfully identified to be significantly associated with the disease in a discovery phase. All these SNPs are located in intergenic region on chromosome 28. Literature search showed that all four genes neighboring these significant SNPs are directly or indirectly involved in inflammatory related diseases and with skin and immune system as related phenotypes in other species like humans. Therefore, we suggest that these genes might be good candidates for future research, to identify the causal genetic abnormalities of the disease. In further applications, this study can provide new dimensions in diagnostic and treatment domains related to demodicosis in dogs and once established in dogs as model organism, it can further be extended to benefit humans.