Chicken Genome Sequenced

Jonmann writes "The chicken (Gallus gallus) genome has been sequenced by the International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium. The new genome map provides new, more detailed clues as to how birds diverged from mammals in the course of evolution." I, for one, welcome our new 5-foot-tall, all-white-meat, pre-coated-with-tasty-batter chicken overlords.

Comments

5-foot-tall overlords

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I, for one, welcome our new 5-foot-tall, all-white-meat, pre-coated-with-tasty-batter chicken overlords.

I'm waiting for meat animals without heads or brains, so you can eat meat without the animals having to live unpleasent cruel lives. I love meat, but I feel really bad for the animals.

With the new sequencing...

[CokoBWare]

Can we eventually inject chicken genes into a soy bean so we can make tofu taste like chicken?

Re:MODERATION MADNESS == NOT FUNNY.

[Mprx]

Insects are a much more energy efficient source of meat. Sure, people might be squeamish now, but sell them ground up, give them a fancy name, and pay some celebrities to publicly eat them, and you've got the meat of the future.

On the use of the chicken genome

[Lars Arvestad]

Several posters seem to assume that the main objective of having the chicken genome available is to make better and cheaper food products. There is of course some truth to that, but there are also other advantages.

Through domestication and long time (traditional) breeding, the farm chicken has become quite frail and there are several genetic dispositions for problematic conditions for chickens. Knowing its genome could help breeding (both traditional and more modern directed) generate a healthier bird. It is worth noting the man's best fried, the dog, also has these problems due to breeding.

The sequenced genome is actually from the wild Red Jungle fowl, and not the domestic chicken, so there will be plenty of "healthy genome" to learn from.

For scientists, finally having a bird genome is also great. It is further away from chimp, mouse, rat, dog, and other "close" genomes, while closer than, say, fly and nematode. It lands somewhere between us and fish, of which we today have something like three genomes (zebrafish, fugu, and tetraodon). A goal for choosing species to sequence today is having a good and even species sampling to make what is called comparative genomics better materials for comparisons. A nice resource for genomics of higher organisms is Ensembl, where you can get a glimpse of some of the more interesting animal genomes available.