

Areas of particular interest include characterization of autoimmune diseases, oncology, discovery of neutralizing antibodies against infectious disease, tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and use as a tool to study residual disease.

"Genomes of the chicken and other species distant from ourselves have provided us with a powerful tool to resolve key biological processes that have been conserved over millennia," comments consortium leader Richard Wilson of Washington State University. Immune repertoire sequencing is frequently used to analyze immune responses, both current and distant. The results should help scientists better understand basic developmental biology, as well as improve vaccine production models. The team also found some unique common ground between people and chickens: for example, there is a chicken gene for interleukin 26, which is an important immune response in people and had not yet been identified in other animals. "The recognizable repetitive content of the chicken genome is only about 10 percent as compared to about 50 percent for humans," explains lead author LaDeana Hillier of Washington University School of Medicine. The reduced number of base pairs in the fowl genome results in part from chickens possessing less so-called junk DNA than humans do. Tools for adaptive immune receptor repertoire (AIRR) sequencing continue to evolve rapidly, and, although some established frameworks are emerging, there are no complete solutions: it is necessary to select tools and build a customised pipeline. The results indicate that humans share about 60 percent of their genes with the chicken humans and rats have 88 percent of their genes in common.

Supplementary Figure 2.1: Schematic displaying. Sequencing chicken antibody repertoires following hyperimmunization and the identification of antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies Abstract Neutralizing antibodies through recombinant protein. "The chicken has also been used extensively as a model by developmental biologists for over a century and the availability of a gene catalogue for the species will boost research in this area," says David Burt of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh and a member of the International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium. Mapping of the immunoglobulin light chain GACEs, colour coded by pseudogene usage in 1,000 repertoire sequences. But it has only 1 billion DNA base pairs to our 2.9 billion pairs. The findings, published today in the journal Nature, reveal that, like us, the bird has between 20,000 and 23,000 genes. The chicken has joined the growing group of animals whose genome has been sequenced.
