Equine and canine parental test kit

[Dr. Nick]

My best friend is a vet and we wanted to see how would service of parental testing for dogs and horses be interesting for his customers.

So, I tried finding kits for parental testing for these animals, but I’m stuck in dead end. I can’t find any, all I’m finding are companies already offering this service. I was thinking about kits with specific PCR primers, used for amplification of spec regions, Taq, etc. like one used for human identification. Or maybe there are some better now on the market.

Please help if you know where I can buy kits like this.

 

[Moonbear]

Most likely, the companies offering the services own the licenses and are making enough money providing the service already. Besides, the time it would take to process and the technical skill and equipment required doesn't make it seem feasible as something to do in a vet's office anyway. These companies have automated, high throughput systems that allow them to process a lot of samples in a short time, but it won't take much less time to process a single sample than to process 20 samples.

In addition, in the equine industry (perhaps also true for show dogs, but I don't know), tracking parentage is already a big deal, at least for pure bred horses, but all the evidence is provided at the time of the mating regarding parentage, including videotapes of the mating to prove which two horses were mated. The breeders are probably already sending samples off to these companies in order to provide proof to their customers that they have provided them with the foal they promised. I don't think anyone would go to their local vet to confirm something so important, and when you're paying $20,000 or $40,000 or more in stud fees, the cost of paternity testing is not going to phase those people, and they're going to want it done by an expert who can testify in court if there is a problem.

If your friend is thinking this will in some way be useful for finding the father of the litter of puppies someone's dog just had, it won't be unless they have a suspect for comparison anyway.

The best approach would probably be to just provide the service of collecting the samples to send off to one these companies that does the testing if there are clients really interested in this.