Review

Current Status of Application of Genome Information to Poultry Breeding

Azizul   Haque1   Sea-Hwan  Sohn2   Bo-Seok  Kang3   Jong Joo  Kim1,*   

1Department of Biotechnology, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, Gyeongbuk, 38541, Korea
2Department of Animal Science & Biotechnology, Gyeongnam National University of Science and Technology 52725, Korea
3Poultry Research Institute, National Institute of Animal Science, Pyeongchang, Kangwon,

Abstract

Chicken has a long history of domestication and used as a great source of animal protein for human consumption throughout the world. Chicken has short generation such that it is used as a model organism in immunology and developmental biology. The international chicken genome-sequencing consortium sequenced and analyzed the chicken genome in 2004 with 6.6-fold coverage and reported that the chicken genome holded less amount of DNA than human genome, while the number of genes are the same as the human genome. The chicken genome sequence is composed of one billion base pairs of DNAs and of approximately 20,000 to 23,000 genes. In recent years, the genomic information of chicken has enabled to identify the expression and function of economically important traits. While the traditional selection methods are unable to evaluate new traits properly, the implication of genome information is a possible solution to overcome the problem. The chicken genome has a wide range of application in the field of evolutionary biology, comparative genomics, systematics model organism of human disease, agriculture, nutrigenomics, immunogenetics and medicine. Nowadays, the increasing demand of quality egg and meat in the world, the genome information is playing a significant role in producing the safe poultry. In this review, we discuss the present status of the application of genome information to poultry breeding and how it can be implemented to increase the performance of modern poultry.

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