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...