Calling All Breed Experts!

HGTD’s phenes database and breed relevancy ratings (BRR) are an important source of information for anyone engaged in dog health and breeding, through the harmonizing of scientific data from a wide-variety of experts, research publications, veterinary and genetics researcher contributions, and in-house expertise. 
Just as important, though, are the contributions from breed experts. Breed experts are individuals with significant knowledge of their breed or breeds. Breed experts are most often breed or kennel club members who work on health and breeding strategies, or veterinarians, researchers, or other dog health professionals who have an interest in a specific breed. Breed experts often provide vital first-hand experience of health issues, are the first to raise awareness about an emerging health concern (or improvement!), directly contribute to research, and give depth and context to the practicalities of dog owning and breeding. 

Are you a breed expert?

HGTD (and IPFD, more generally) has benefited from our breed expert contributors, who have provided breed-specific guidance on diseases important to their breed(s), links to current ongoing research, and feedback on HGTD features that are most beneficial or in need of improvement. These contributions make HGTD unique by being a resource by and for the whole dog health community. Within the Phenes database of HGTD, in addition to the breed-specific researcher provided information, you can find examples where breed clubs have provided links to breeder resources, or highlighted breed-specific mutations - which are important to ensuring you get the right test for your breed. 

HGTD welcomes input from breed experts in a number of areas.

If you’ve got some expertise you can share, help us improve by:

• Signing up as a Member of IPFD (it’s currently free, and you can access Members-only information)
• Reviewing the breed relevancy ratings for your breed. We base these ratings primarily on peer-reviewed research and health/veterinary expert input, but contributions from breed experts have helped us refine and add detail to relevance information. This is especially helpful for differences between countries/regions. 
• Providing breed club information related to breed-specific tests and diseases – especially helpful are non-English versions for our world-wide users.
• Sending us questions!  We feature questions related directly to genetic testing on this blog, and more general breeding for health questions in our Ask Aimee blog. 
• Sharing IPFD and HGTD information and resources with your community

If you have any contributions or questions, please email them to: aimee.llewellyn-zaidi@ipfdogs.com 

 
Image: Artem Beliaikin via Pexels