AN Australian-led project has successfully sequenced the genome of the horse.

The findings would make identifying markers for genetic diseases and understanding horse biology easier, the head author of the project, Professor Claire Wade from the University of Sydney, said.

"Better tests for genetic diseases such as disorders of the muscle, therapies for respiratory disease and allergic diseases of the horse are already being made possible through our increased understanding of equine biology,'' Prof Wade said.

Horses have a unique population history with important implications for mapping genetic traits, she said.

"Horses do not appear to have undergone a tight domestication bottleneck and the presence of many female ancestors in domestic horse history are evidence of this. It looks as though we basically domesticated all of the ancestral horses.''

Horses have a newly formed centromere - the DNA near the middle of the chromosome - that has not had time to accumulate the normal characteristics of centromeres in related species.

"This affords us an opportunity to examine how centromeres function,'' Prof Wade said.

Dr Natasha Ellis, a research fellow at The University of Sydney, is using information from the project to look at performance related genes in horses.

Dr Ellis found similar human genes for performance in the horse genome although said it was hard to tell if these genes affected racing performance.

"Diverse species give an insight into how things work in the human. There will be many more examples of how the horse genome sequence will aid human studies,'' Dr Ellis said.

The findings of the research will be published in the Science journal this month.