Books on Equine genetics
indian
August 25, 2009 February 22, 2011
Forums
I really need help ASAP with this. I am doing an independant study course focusing on an in-depth study of equine color genetics, genetic mutations, inhertiable traits by breed, and genetic diesases. Anyone know where I can go to get books or articles on these topics? This is a 10 week course and I am not sure if I can fit all the aforementioned into that timeframe. Any ideas?? Classes resume September 23 and I need to meet with my instructor to finalize my course syllabus for independant studies long before that. I appreciate any and all help I can get.
Re: Books on Equine genetics
There is only one recent textbook on equine genetics as a whole. It is The Genetics of the Horse, edited by A.T. Bowling and A. Ruvinsky. It is slightly out of date now, as we are making huge strides in this field every year, but it will give you a good overview. It is written as a scientific text, so the reading can be heavy. The last layperson text to be done on equine genetics was also written by Ann Bowling, and is called Horse Genetics. It is very out of date now--it's over ten years old--but again, could be a good basic source of information. There isn't anything wrong with it per se, it's just that we know a lot more now.
There are more books on color genetics specifically...Phil Sponenberg just put out a new edition of Equine Color Genetics. There's Horse Color Explained by Jeanette Gower, but I would not recommend it as a good source of information. It's not well-written or well-researched and has several blatant errors. Good pictures, though.
To stay very up-to-date, your best bet will be to search for the latest scientific articles on equine genetics. There's a ton of stuff being done with the new Illumina SNP chp, so a lot of new information is coming out of that. You can do a search on PubMed (part of NCBI's) site. Many of the articles are accessible for free, but your school may also have subscriptions to the journals that aren't.