Do you use model organisms to study specific genes or genetic variations to research a particular human disease or phenotype? The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Comparative Genomics Resource (CGR) offers a cutting-edge NCBI toolkit of high-quality genomics data and tools to help you with comparative genomics analysis for eukaryotic organisms.  

As comparative genomics advances, an increasing number of model organisms (established and emerging) are relied upon for studying human health. Dog genomes have been extensively studied and characterized and many genetic variations have been identified that are associated with canine hereditary diseases. Among these are several cancers which are common in both species, making dogs an ideal model for human disease progression and treatment. 

How and why should you use our resources? Consider the example below.

It is well known that specific variants in the TP53 (tumor protein p53) gene cause Li-Fraumeni syndrome in humans, which dramatically increases a person’s risk to develop several types of cancer. Genetic variants in TP53 have been frequently found in canine cancers including osteosarcoma and histiocytic sarcoma. Understanding how these variants cause disease and influence targeted chemotherapy responses can guide the creation of next generation diagnostics and therapeutics to improve the health of both dogs and humans.  

The following are relevant CGR and other NCBI resources that can help with your research on TP53 with example records and search results.  

	Learn what is known about the dog TP53 gene on the NCBI Gene page
	Explore synteny for the dog and human TP53 genomic regions with the Comparative Genome Viewer (CGV)
	Examine TP53 gene and sequence details for the dog and human genome assemblies alongside other annotation tracks in Genome Data Viewer (GDV)
	Compare dog, human, and other organisms’ TP53 proteins with a quick multiple sequence alignment using NCBI Orthologs and COBALT
	Visualize the human TP53 protein 3D structure and directly map aligned human and dog sequences to known clinical variants in ClinVar using the iCn3D tool

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