How does inbreeding affect racing performance in Thoroughbred racehorses. A study of 135,000 horses is completed to find out

In the middle of January on PLOS One, the paper that outlined the development of the Equine 50K SNP chip was released. The chip, or genotyping array, was actually developed back in 2008 and since that time they have gone on to add another 11,000 SNP's to another chip tabbed the Equine 70K chip (even though it only has ~65,000 usable SNP's), which was the technology that we used to complete our genome wide study on athletic performance in thoroughbreds and in turn create the g

Two really important scientific papers were published today (at least I think they are!). The first was a paper written by Matthew Binns to do with inbreeding in the thoroughbred. He and his team found (unsurprisingly) that the thoroughbred has increased in inbreeding coefficient in the last 40 years, and even more so since the advent of big stallion books. The papers is really quite eye opening as it outlines the rate of inbreeding and how with the advent of big books, the r