An old adage holds that friends should share, so it is of little surprise that man’s best friend—domesticated dogs—share many of the same diseases as humans. Recent studies in dog genomics have helped scientists explore many of the genetic mechanisms underlying shared diseases between canines and humans, including cancer and neurological disorders.

A great deal of genomic research has focused on exploring genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP). The SNP data currently used in many studies on dogs is drawn from only two dogs, greatly limiting this data’s usability and accessibility. Ya-Ping Zhang’s research group at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (KIZ, CAS) has recently proposed an online platform to facilitate the retrieval of SNP information that will help integrate information from SNP-related genes, transcripts, and proteins. As a first step, Zhang’s team has uploaded newly sequenced data from over fifty dogs and several wolves to this new platform.

The database is freely available online at: http://dogsd.big.ac.cn