Is blood the best sample for breed identification?
No, not necessarily. It has been suggested that a blood sample is the “Gold Standard” for genotyping applications. That is simply not true. For every critical application where DNA is required it is typically a cheek swab that is used. For example, if you are watching CSI on TV, the investigators take a cheek swab to match a suspects DNA to evidence found at a crime scene. Globally, DNA databases used for matching DNA have been built by using cheek swabs. Blood samples are simply not the only, nor the preferred, way to collect DNA samples for forensics labs, the FBI or any other organization that routinely collects DNA. In human paternity testing more than 95% of the labs who perform those tests use cheek cells collected on swabs. If you look in the scientific literature, more than 85% of papers published over the past 10 years involving genotyping (what we do in the breed identification process) use a cheek swab. If the use of a cheek swab is the best method for collecting samples tha
