Transcriptomics Research in Chicken

The chicken (Gallus gallus) is an important model organism in genetics, developmental biology, immunology and evolutionary research. Moreover, besides being an important model organism the chicken is also a very important agricultural species and an important source of food (eggs and meat). The availability of the draft chicken genome sequence provided many possibilities to in detail study a variety of genomic changes during evolution using a comparison between chicken and mammals. For example, compared to mammals, the use of a Z/W sex determination system is a special aspect of the avian genome where the female is the heterogametic sex (ZW) and the male is the homogametic (ZZ) sex. A comparison of the genomic sequences of platypus, chicken and human showed that sex chromosomes evolved separately in birds and mammal