The drug Clenbuterol is a β2 agonist with some structural and pharmacological similarities to epinephrine (adrenaline). Therapeutically, clenbuterol is a fantastic bronchodilator and has been approved by the FDA for use in horses for the management of airway obstruction. If a horse has mucus in the throat there is nothing better on the market that can clean it up and help the horse get to the racetrack. That is the good. Clenbuterol is also the drug that cyclist Alberto Conta

Three interesting papers have come across my desk that I thought were worth commenting on: The first is a genome wide study on height and other conformation characteristics in Franches-Montagnes horses. They used around 40,000 SNPs to do their analysis which is a lot less than what we used to do ours (~65,000) but the method is the same (comparing two groups and looking at where a signal is found). Interestingly they found two QTL's that explained ~18.2% of the heritable vari