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.

Re:5-foot-tall overlords

[bcattwoo]

you can eat meat without the animals having to live unpleasent cruel lives

I feel the same way. The lives these farm raised animals live bothers me more than they have to die for my consumption. I don't eat a lot of meat, but I can't see cutting it out completely.

It confuses me when fellow meat eaters are repulsed by hunting, even if the hunter plans on eating his kill. Seems to me a free life cut short by a swift death is preferrable to short life crammed in a cage. I had a suitemate in college who didn't eat meat but would eat eggs. He didn't seem to realize that the enslaved chicken whose eggs he was eating was going to end up just as dead and be eaten by either another person or farm animal.

Re:5-foot-tall overlords

[hal9000]

"There are also environmental consequences to being a vegetarian/vegan (though minimized or eliminated if you grow your own without using pesticides and chemical fertilizers)."

Most serious vegetarians are aware of this. I don't see how it stands as an argument against vegetarianism though. There is no such thing as a diet with zero footprint on the environment. But in general, for those of us living in the modern world who get food from modern sources, a true vegetarian diet is better on the environment than an omnivorous one.

"If everyone was vegan on an overpopulated planet, we'd turn the place into a dustball pretty quick too."

How do you mean? People eat meat that comes from herbivorous and omnivorous animals that have to be fed. It's more efficient for people to eat the crops directly. Anyway, in reality, there is obviously no danger of everyone on Earth suddenly becoming vegetarian.

"I choose to assume responsibility for what I am. Omnivorous. I eat what's available."

Appeal to nature. Societal pressures have us go against "what we are" (our genes) all the time. Someone who is hot tempered has no more right than anyone else to assault a person.

The what?

[sarlen]

International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium

Does that make anyone else scratch their head and wonder what other kind of downright stupid consortiums we have? I mean it's a noble cause, no doubt, but calling it a consortium feigns a certain amount of dignity to chicken research that I'm not prepared to give.

all WHITE meat?

[Naikrovek]

hmm all WHITE meat from the WHITE chicken farmers? who may one day visit the WHITE house? Huh. I see how you are.

I for one welcome our DARK meat 8 foot tall DARK feathered chickens, with the crushing toes and the beak and the poking and the crushing and the hey hey it hurts me.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: How do you know when a joke has jumped the shark?

A: When even the Slashdot editors are making it!

Come on, they don't even read the site! It's like when your parents start using a slang term, you automatically realise that it's no longer cool.

With the new sequencing...

[CokoBWare]

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

chickens diverging from mammals?

[kendoka]

My bio's a little rusty but aren't chickens in the aves (family? order? whatever? =)) Aves didn't descend from mammals. Aves and mammals share a common ancestor in perhaps the dinosaurs...

Re:chickens diverging from mammals?

[Acy James Stapp]

Mammals are descended from cynodonts from therapsids (mammal-like reptiles) which descended from the synapsid reptiles, which descended from the early amniotes.

Birds are descended from theropods, one of the two groups of saurischian dinosaurs, from archosaurs, which descend from the diapsid reptiles, from amniotes. Notable theropods are the raptors, tyrannosaurus, and allosaurus, and of course, aves.

The sauropods also descended from the saurischian dinosaurs. Notable here are the thecodonts, brachisaurus, and diplodicus.

The ornithician dinosaurs descended from archosaurs as well. Notable here are ankylosaurus, stegosaurus, iguanadon, etc.

Other ancient lineages are the turtles (from anapsids, from amniotes), crocodilians (from the archosaurs), and modern reptiles and snakes (from diapsids).

Big Money. The goal is no wings and smaller talons

[human bean]

And possibly no feathers.

A commercial chicken's purpose in life (if you can call it living) is to eat and produce eggs, meat, or more chickens.

When you farm chickens, the goal is to get as much non-human-consumable protein and carbohydrate into salable form as possible. Feathers, beaks, feet, and less desireable parts need to be minimized in order to fulfill the goal.

Gene-spliced chickens can solve some of this, producing more usable foodstuff.

The previous solution, however, was to simply have the USDA regulate that ALL parts of a chicken are "chicken". Remember that the next time you eat a chicken nugget.

Gallus Gallus?

[DamienMcKenna]

The chicken (Gallus gallus)

Shouldn't that be Bokkus bokkus?

Damien

Re:Big Money. The goal is no wings and smaller tal

[b-baggins]

---
A commercial chicken's purpose in life (if you can call it living) is to eat and produce eggs, meat, or more chickens.
---

Exactly. Whereas a chicken's purpose in the wild is to eat, produce eggs, more chicken and feed foxes.

The commercial exploitation of chickens is absolutely horrible.

Re:I doubt it...

[Otter]

"Mapping", in the context of genomics, refers to the generation of orientation frameworks to specify physical and recombinational locations. That step precedes sequencing, or at least precedes sequence assembly. The maps we have today are extremely unlikely to change substantively.

You can quibble over whether it is an appropriate term, but that's the sense in which the word has been used for nearly a century and in which it's used today.

But let me guess...

[Telastyn]

They still do not know what came first.

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.