DNA methylations : A comparison of four genes between Red Junglefowl and White Leghorn

Domestication of animals has given rise to a great phenotypic divergence in selected animals and rapidly generated species of animals more accustomed to human contact and social interactions within the species. Previous studies in chickens (Gallus gallus) have managed to find behavioral and adaptive differences between Red Junglefowl (RJF) and White Leghorn (WL), differences inherent to the domestication process. These phenotypic changes could spawn from a variety of different genomic factors, including an epigenetic gene expression regulatory mechanism known as CpG methylation, a DNA modification of CpG dinucleotides that in turn affect nucleosome formation. In this study we investigated the methylation differences between RJF and WL. This by selecting genes that has previously been shown to be both differentially expressed (DE) and differentially methylated (DM) between RJF and WL, and had shown the same kind of differences in both parental animals and their offspring. By using methylation-sensitive high-resolution melting (MSHRM) we tried to confirm previous DM result, and four genes; FUCA1, RUFY3, PCDHAC1 and TXNDC16 were tested and verified to be DM between RJF and WL