Scientists Extract DNA From Seabiscuit’s Hooves To Figure Out How He Was So Fast

Seabiscuit was not an impressive-looking horse. He was considered quite lazy, preferring to eat and sleep in his stall rather than exercise. He’d been written off by most of the racing industry after losing his first 17 races. But Seabiscuit eventually became one of the most beloved thoroughbred champions of all time – voted 1938 Horse of the Year after winning his legendary match race as an underdog against Triple Crown winner War Admiral in 1938.

As a molecular physiologist, the concept of understanding how specific gene variants can affect performance, whether in athletics, learning or even how an organism develops, has always intrigued me. Thoroughbred racing seemed a promising arena to study this idea, since successful racehorses need not only elite physical attributes, but also the mental makeup of a champion, sometimes referred to as the “will to win.”

At the Institute for Equine Genomics here at Binghamton University, we try to better understand the genetic components associated with breeding success in thoroughbreds and other horse breeds. We are also interested in finding gene variants that could help horses before and after their racing careers. We’ve successfully run tests for horse farms across the U.S. and in South Africa and New Zealand to assist with breeding decisions and help them identify early which horses were probably not suited for the track.
A few years back, Jacqueline Cooper from the Seabiscuit Heritage Foundation got in touch. She wanted to genetically test a fifth-generation descendant of Seabiscuit, named Bronze Sea, for breeding purposes. Jacqueline asked if any genetic information about Seabiscuit could be obtained from sequencing Bronze Sea.* But since Seabiscuit was so far back in the pedigree, our lab really couldn’t be sure which of Bronze Sea’s genes came from his famous great-great-great grandsire. It would only work if comparison tissue from Seabiscuit still existed – an unlikely proposition since he died in 1947 and is buried in an undisclosed grave at Ridgewood Ranch in Northern California.

During a group phone call between me, Jacqueline and Michael Howard, the great-grandson of Seabiscuit’s owner, he mentioned that Seabiscuit’s hooves had been removed and preserved after the champion died. Now this piqued my interest; my lab group has had great success extracting reasonably intact DNA from ancient bone samples.
It turned out that Seabiscuit’s silvered hooves – think of a baby’s booties coated in metal – were on display at the California Thoroughbred Foundation. Although not common practice today, historically it was customary to remove the hooves of a champion racehorse as a keepsake prior to burial. The silvered hooves often served as decorative mementos, sometimes even being used to hold cigarettes and matches....MORE