This page is a work-in-progress. Century-old dogma about the Agouti ‘locus’ in dogs has been turned on its head by recent advances in the genetic understanding of promoter regions that affect agouti colour inheritance in dogs.
It will be a few years before the newer genetic tests are validated in Lapphunds but they are now commercially available through select labs, and I’m going to start using the terminology here. Hopefully a few questions will be answered a lappies start to be tested, as existing colour tests haven’t always given meaningful results, particularly for ‘wolf sable’ lapphunds.
If you see a an unattributed photo, or have questions, just ask.
This page wont work properly on a mobile phone.
Below are a bunch of photo grids. These are punnet squares that will eventually show examples of the range of agouti phenotypes in Lapphunds. Each grid shows dogs with a fixed known genotype at the E locus or MCR1 gene locus.
I’m still open to the possibility that there may be subtle variations in MCR1 that lead to different phenotypes in Lapphunds that ‘test’ as E.
I use pictures of Australian owned or bred dogs where possible. Enjoy.
The first group includes dogs that are known to be Ee.
Group 2 is a set of dogs who are EeA. eA has only recently become testable so there aren't many tested dogs yet.
Group 3 dogs are EE.
Group 4 dogs are eA/e.
Group 5 would be eA/eA. There are only a handful of lappies around with a known eA/eA genotype so I haven’t made a separate grid for them. They are likely to be not so differerent to the eA/e group. In theory they might have a bit more eumelanin but I doubt it makes much difference in the grand scheme of things. Group 6 would be e/e. There are plenty of e/e lapphunds but because the agouti expression in the fur is completely hidden, a grid of e/e Lapphunds is going to look pretty much identical.. ie all cream dogs. In my own first litter, the ‘Bickies’ the puppies who were at/at all had more skin pigment than the puppies who were at/a. Significant? I don’t know, but it’s plausible that ASIP has an influence.