Posted on 05/25/2006 10:56:27 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Hoping to get their roosters in a row, chicken researchers gathered earlier this month at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and hatched plans for analyzing the first bird genome. Eighteen months after an initial draft of the chicken sequence was released, bioinformaticists are still struggling to identify the fowl's 20,000 or so genes.
Chicken genome researchers face a host of obstacles including insufficient funding, confusing new gene names, conflicting computer predictions, and the need to nudge other chicken scientists into the genomics world. The ancestor of domesticated chickens, the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus), is the lone avian among a dozen vertebrates already sequenced, and comparison with other genomes is difficult because the chicken evolved 300 million years ago--much, much earlier than humans or mice.
David Burt, a molecular biologist at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, U.K., has asked U.S. and British science agencies for money to set up a consortium to characterize the bird's genes. But getting organized is tough, says Wes Warren of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "We have two different communities"--agricultural poultry scientists and biomedical researchers using chickens to study diseases--who have had little in common.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
I'm combing the web right now.
I wonder how similiar chicken and ptarmigan genome is?
But if you're out there combing the web, then wattle I do with *my* time?
[I am *so* very sorry for that one].....;D
That was foul.
I grappled with a chicken genome the other day too, and I think I [brrrrrruuup!] won.
Probably not much, otherwise everyone would on occasion say, "tastes like ptarmigan".
Heh... heh... pluck if I know. That's it, I'm out.
Why, oh, why couldn't this have been about the bison genome?
With patience, even an egg will walk.
Prefer light or dark meat?
Oops, sorry, a duplicate. Yolk can have the last word.
I was just membrane that one. ;')
Ptarmigan and chicken are related to each other. Ptarmigan and chicken babies look the same, except ptarmigans are darker colored and reddish in willow ptarmigans. Ptarmigan is not a well known bird, despite being related to chicken. It is a plot by bunnies. The Smithsonian used to have ptarmigans, but replaced it with two rabbits and two hares.
Egad!
Can't top that one......;D
What's your beef with the chicken puns? Besides, I'm sure there would be a herd of FReepers punning bison. Alrighty, I gotta hoof it, see ya!
Seen that photo many times. Gives me the creeps.
Auroch, I'll admit it, you're probably right.
LOL
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