Sullivan Research Lab

Dr. Stacey Sullivan is a veterinary neurologist with 30 years of clinical experience. One of the most common animal health issues addressed by a veterinary neurologist is type 1 disc disease, and the dachshund is a commonly affected breed.

Dr. Sullivan’s research is aimed at improving spinal health in dachshunds by developing breeding strategies to reduce disc disease risk in the breed. She collaborates nationally and internationally with researchers, breeders and breed clubs.

Having worked with dachshunds professionally for many years, Dr. Sullivan eventually came to own and breed hunting dachshunds. Her experience with this smallest of hunting breeds has led her to pursue a second research question: How exactly do dogs map and navigate their world using their sense of olfaction? 

Current Projects

• Breeding Strategies to Improve Spinal Health in Dogs. We are investigating tools that breeders could use to improve spinal health in chondrodystrophic dog breeds. Examples of breeder tools are genetic testing and phenotype screening tests such as radiographic spinal scoring (K-n). Our goals are to determine which (if any) tests are useful in spinal health breeding schemes, to make scientifically based recommendations as to how testing should be implemented, and to use statistical modeling to predict spinal health outcomes in dogs.

• OdorVision3D aka Odor-directed Navigation in Dogs. Although detection and discrimination of odors are amazing dog skills, dogs’ real superpower is their ability to use their noses to locate the source of an odor and navigate to it. How do they do it? What is the same or different about their brains and ours?  In our current project, we are using a drone to obtain thermal imaging videos of dogs working scent trails of game animals. Our goal is to describe what it looks like when dogs search for and detect scent, how much they use ground vs airborne scent to navigate, how well they can discriminate individual prey animals from others of that species, how prey animals manipulate odor to fool the dogs, and the role of persistence in successful odor-directed navigation. We are developing a scoring system for the various sub-behaviors that make up odor-directed navigation, so that we can look for the genetic basis of these behaviors.

• The Genetics of Hunting Behaviors in Dachshunds. Once we develop the scoring system for hunting behaviors, we will begin work the Xu Wang Lab to look for genetic differences between the Best and Worst scoring dogs for each behavior.

Publications

The relationship between radiographic disc calcification score and FGF4L2 genotype in Dachshunds.  Stacey Sullivan, David Redden, Froydis Hardeng, Malin Sundqvist, Michelle Kutzler. JVIM, in press   Breeder Summary CDDY Gene Dose

Case Report: FGF4L1 Retrogene Insertion is Lacking in the Tall Dachshund Phenotype Stacey Sullivan, Katarzyna Julia Szeremeta, Michelle Kutzler.  Frontiers in Veterinary Neurology and Neurosurgery, in press.  Breeder Summary Tall Dachshund

Team

Stacey Sullivan
DVM, North Carolina State University
Residency in Neurology and Neurosurgery, University of Georgia
Lab role:  Principal investigator

Mikailie Caulder
Auburn University Public and One Health (Genetics), undergraduate student
Lab role:  Mikailie is undertaking a semester long undergraduate research project on the subject of Odor-directed Navigation in Dogs.