Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer, settled a bet in 1872 by showing, with a single photographic negative, that a horse has four feet off the ground at the trot. This evidence was groundbreaking for photography, and now, 140 years later, trotting horses have yielded another breakthrough, this time in the field of genetics.

Scientists at Sweden’s 535-year-old Uppsala University recently discovered that a single gene, which they have called DMRT3, largely explained why some horses could trot or pace and why some could not. Leif Andersson, the lead researcher and a professor of functional genomics at Uppsala, called it a “sensational finding.”

The discovery could greatly affect harness racing, which traces its American roots to the mid-18th century. The findings are so new that almost nobody in the sport has heard about them yet.

But Jimmy Takter has. Takter is a Hall of Fame trainer who has twice won the Hambletonian Stakes, the top event in harness racing. One of his owners, Bengt Agerup, a Swedish scientist and entrepreneur who won the 2010 Hambletonian with the Takter-trained Muscle Massive, financed the study. Agerup, who last year sold his company Q-Med to the German pharmaceutical company Galderma for about $1.2 billion, lives in Uppsala, Sweden.