Chicken genetic sequence decoded

Main Category: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 07 Mar 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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Scientists at Washington University Medical School, St. Louis, USA have examined the whole DNA of the ancestor of the domestic chicken, the Red Jungle Fowl.

At the Beijing Genomics Institute, scientists have mapped the genetic code of three types of domestic chickens.

This could eventually help scientists combat diseases such as avian flu (bird flu).

There are about 1,000,000,000 base pairs (letters) of DNA in the chicken genome. The human genome has about 3,000,000,000.

Within the DNA code are the chicken's genes. These are the starting template its cells use to make proteins.

These molecules build the chickens body and maintain it.

The sequence has been placed in a public database. It is the first draft. The gene locations still need to be tracked down. Some tidying up also needs to be done.

The information now in the public database will be extremely useful for biomedical and agricultural scientists worldwide.

Dr Dave Burt, of the Roslin Institute, UK, said 'The basic scaffold is there. Now we have to attach the meaning to it - it needs people to annotate the sequence, to say where the genes are. The project will bring together all the biological knowledge about the chicken.'

Scientists will probably compare the information in the public database with the human code. They may be able to gain deeper understanding into the human biochemical make-up.

Recent avian flu outbreaks have speeded up interest in learning more about the chicken genome.

Chickens are also widely used in biomedical research.

The chicken is used as a model for the study of embryology and development. It is also used to study the connection between viruses and some cancers.

The data has been deposited into the GenBank database for worldwide release.

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