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 ...
:'D Hey, I was desperate. Salamander and you ran me all the way out of chicken ideas.
...to the point that I was a little a fried.
"Prefer light or dark meat?"
Well, yes.
Mongolian Cluster...
or (given the cross-species)...
"Mongolian Flustered Cluck"(C) TM
What's the matter, are you chicken?
Cheers!
"That no good hare must die!"
"Hare! Die! Hair die! That's a joke, son!"
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