🧬Here’s a bit more info on DVL2.🧬
Humans who carry the dishevelled (DVL) gene, have a disabling type of mesomelic dwarfism called Robinow syndrome.
It is a disability in humans that causes shortening of the long bones (limbs), debilitating spinal abnormalities as well as often having variable cardiac, oral and urogenital anomalies. It also causes intraoral intranasal brachycephaly, which is evident by their distinctive infantile facial features, prominent forehead, widely spread eyes and flat nasal bridge.
If we as humans carried this gene, i very much doubt that anyone would purposely want to reproduce this syndrome and bring a child into a life of suffering, so why should we in our Frenchies!
We know 95% of French & British bulldogs have hemivertebrae (this is not a good thing!)
To date 120 spinal X-rays have been done on single copy DVL2 dogs all resulting in perfect 0 scores. Any single, or zero copy DVL2 dogs will not present with the robinow-like syndrome & will be free of hemivertabrae.
DVL2 is also linked to brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome (BOAS, problems breathing) congenital heart defects such as murmurs and much more, so by breeding this gene out, we will be reducing, possibly eliminating these problems.
So what about the tails... everyone wants to know about the tails!
So far, all tails have been of vastly varying degrees of length, they have not all been long like the 3 pups that I produced, there have been quite a few 1 copy dvl2 dogs that have been born without a tail just the same as the frenchy "standard", sure some have been longer but most have actually been just a few-several inches.
The reason some have longer snouts is because of the robinow-like syndrome mutant gene that is being removed. This is what a human with 2 copies dvl (dishevelled gene) looks like. As you can see, they also have the same facial phenotype, they have the same spinal deviations, they too have the shortened longbones, like I touched on at begining of post, they also funnily enough are prone to harelips/cleft pallate, spinal issues, heart murmurs, abnormal genitalia and some types of brain cancer, quite synonymous with what we are seeing in these dogs to be factual.
Will they be long in the legs? Probably not. Frenchies are what's known as a chondrodystophic breed, they still carry the CDDY gene, which is a very dominant genotype-phenotype (lets make that a subject for another day!) In the carriers that i've bred, I havent noticed longer legs at all to be honest, so all the misinformed giraffe comments I've seen being thrown about on facebook are all sticks and stones in my actual, factual, hands on experience! 👌😏
More reading can be found:
And here:
And here
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