Best price for SCID testing is to do it through
F.O.A.L. You can get order info from their website at www.foal.org . Cost is $99. They
will send you kits for cheek/gum scraping unless you specify that you prefer to
draw blood.
Why would being a SCID carrier preclude this mare
from being bred? If she is, indeed, a carrier, one has to ascertain that
the stallion to whom she is bred is not a carrier. If she is a mare of
high quality, it would be a shame to throw away the rest of her genetic material
because of one gene. As long as a carrier is never bred to another
carrier, you can never produce an affected foal. And while there is a
50-50 chance that the foal may likewise be a carrier, there is also a 50-50
chance that the foal will be clear. The gene in its heterozygous
state has NO negative effect on the individual. Equine geneticists
with a far better understanding of population genetics than what I have even
urge people not to simply reject carriers out of hand as breeding stock, but
rather to simply consider carrier status to be one fault among many, and
consider it like any other fault in planning breedings. With gradual
reduction of the genetic frequency over several generations rather than abrupt
reduction by eliminating carriers from the gene pool out of hand, there is less
chance of unmasking other lethals for which we do NOT have a test, as well as
less chance of losing a great deal of positive genetic material along with the
SCID gene.
I have an 8-year old Arabian mare whose dam is a SCID
carrier. I want to test my mare to see if she is a carrier
(which would preclude me from breeding her). The
only resource I have found is a mail-order DNA test kit that sells for around
$130.00 and which uses cheek cell scrapings as its source of
genetic
material.
Ahoy,
Ridecampers! Does anybody have any other
resources and/or information that tells me how accurate these tests
are? We are located in central
California.
Thanks, Liz Carey and Basia princessbasia@xxxxxxxxx
