PAG-X will again be at the Town & Country Convention Center in San Diego, CA, running from Sat., Jan. 12, through Wed., Jan. 16, 2002. See www.intl-pag.org/pag. Click on the session or workshop in question to get more information about the schedule. Deadline for submission of abstracts is October 12, 2001 and deadline for the early registration rate is November 1, 2001. This year all abstracts must be submitted electronically.

As indicated in the title above, those interested in microbial genomes, especially the genomes of agriculture-related pathogens, will be joining us this year. Special microbial genome sessions will be held on Monday afternoon. Francis Collins, "Czar" of the Human Genome Program at NIH, has agreed to give the opening plenary talk on Monday morning. The emphasis for PAG-X will be on functional and comparative genomics. Among the other speakers will be Ralph Greenspan (behavioral genetics of Drosophila), Tom Blundell (structure and function of the proteome), Steve Brown (ENU mutagenesis in mice) and Eric Green (comparative genome sequencing).

The Poultry Workshop/NC-168 meeting will begin at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday next year, in order to provide more time for Station reports, guest speakers and discussing our renewals, followed by a 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. session on Sunday. Plan your flights on Saturday or Friday accordingly. Marlene Emara (emara@UDel.Edu) and Jim Petitte (j_petitte@ncsu.edu) will again co-chair NC-168 and NRSP-8/poultry. Send any comments or suggestions to one of them. Those who usually participate only in NC-168, please note! Next year a weekend-only registration rate ($175) will be made available in addition to the usual student ($225), non-profit ($425 early/$525), and industry ($550 early/$650) full week registrations. Registration badges will be required to participate in any workshop (including NC-168). As usual, some support will be available from the Coordinators for member and student participation, including the Neal Jorgensen Travel Award for Poultry. If interested, please email dodgson@msu.edu as soon as possible.

The Texas A&M U. Departments of Poultry Science and Veterinary Pathobiology seek to fill an Assistant Professor, tenure track position in Avian Molecular Genetics as part of a University-wide initiative in genomics and bioinformatics. See http://gallus.tamu.edu for more information or contact Dr. Alan Sams at asams@poultry.tamu.edu. Applicants should submit a letter of application, CV, statements of research and teaching interests, and three reference letters to: Dr. Alan Sams, Dept. of Poultry Science, College Station, Texas 77843-2472.

Unfortunately, the House of Representatives Agriculture Appropriations Committee has gone along with President Bush's proposal to provide only $106M to the 2002 USDA NRI Competitive Grants Program. This amount is unchanged from this year's NRI budget, which was a reduction from $119M awarded in 2000. The House Committee struck an additional blow to competitive research funding by prohibiting expenditures for the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems (IFAFS) program. The Bush Administration had recommended continued IFAFS funding at this year's level of $120M. Not coincidentally, and as predicted here in our last issue, the House Committee added slightly more than $120M to the CSREES budget, mostly in the form of "special grants" (aka, "pork"). Given the continuing trend in Congress to reduce, or at best, freeze competitive funding to USDA at a time when NIH research budgets are doubling, it will be increasingly difficult to attract state-of-the-art geneticists and other scientists to agricultural research (with the possible exception of plant genomics which is funded via a special NSF-administered program). There remains the chance that IFAFS can be rescued in the Senate, which has traditionally been more supportive of this program, but prospects look grim for NRI in 2002.

IFAFS 2001. Announcements of IFAFS 2001 Awards are expected shortly. For more on IFAFS, see http://www.reeusda.gov/ifafs/. Info on year 2000 awards is at www.reeusda.gov/1700/programs/IFAFS/ifafsawards.htm

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12^th North American Colloquium on Animal Cytogenetics and Gene Mapping, July 15-19, 2001, Davis, California. More information at www.vgl.ucdavis.edu/research/cytoconf (scroll down and right) or at animalcyto@vgl.ucdavis.edu.

Poultry Science Association annual meeting, July 24-28, 2001, Indianapolis, Indiana, to be held as part of the International Animal Agriculture and Food Science Conference. See http://www.fass.org/fass01 or http://www.psa.uiuc.edu for more information.

3^rd UC Davis Transgenic Animal Research Conference, Sept. 9-13, 2001, Granlibakken Conference Center, Tahoe City, CA. See www.biotech.ucdavis.edu and click on "events".

Functional Genomics (satellite meeting of the 8^th Int'l. Conf. on Environmental Mutagens), Oct. 16-18, 2001, Wyndham Hotel, Seattle, WA. See www.genomicfunctions.org for more information.

Plant and Animal and Agricultural Microbe Genome X, joint with NC-168 and NAGRP annual meetings, Jan. 12-16, 2002, Town & Country Convention Center, San Diego, CA. More information above and/or see www.intl-pag.org/pag/.

International Society of Animal Genetics, Göttingen, Germany, August 11-15, 2002. See http://www.gwdg.de/~bbrenig/ISAG2002.html for further information.

7^th World Congress of Genetics Applied to Livestock Production, August 19-23, 2002, Montpellier, France. See http://www.wcgalp.org for more information.

11^th European Poultry Conference, September 6-10, 2002, Bremen, Germany. See www.epc2002.de for further information.

Microsatellite primer kits: Information on microsatellite primer pairs can be found at http://poultry.mph.msu.edu/resources/microkits.htm. We now have a new streamlined replacement kit #1/2 that contains the most polymorphic and evenly distributed markers in kits #1 and #2 (including all of those that are anchor markers on the Groenen et al. Consensus Map, Genome Res. 10:137-147, 2000). PLEASE NOTE: Due to our very limited remaining stock, we are forced to restrict availability of Kit #1/2 to only members of the NAGRP Poultry Species Committee until further notice. We are nearly out of this kit already, and, due to our reduced supply budget and the extra cost of contracting with a supplier licensed by the patent holder (Marshfield Clinic), we probably cannot replenish it until next fiscal year (Oct. 2001). We regret any inconvenience. A few samples of kits #4 to #6 and the Population Tester Kit (for line and/or parentage characterization or for testing the utility of chicken microsatellites in other avian species [not generally recommended]) remain available, although these kits are getting fairly old, and some problems, especially with the dye labels, may result. Contact: (dodgson@.msu.edu) or (hcheng@.msu.edu).

Gene primers: (Reminder) Two sets of PCR primer pairs complementary to chicken mRNAs are still available. In each case, a likely primer pair for PCR was derived based on DNA sequence data (mostly cDNA sequences, so they should be used for RT-PCR). See the Tables entitled "Chicken Gene Primers #1 and #2" under "Resources" (scroll down) at http://poultry.mph.msu.edu. Contact: (dodgson@.msu.edu) or (hcheng@.msu.edu). We'll send you up to 20 primer pairs of your choice. If you find them useful, we'll be happy to send more.

Some users may recently have experienced difficulties in accessing our Poultry Genome Mapping Homepage, http://poultry.mph.msu.edu. In part these have been local problems in setting up appropriate security on our server; others may have been with the local area network (another brief shutdown is expected on July 1). We apologize for any difficulties. Please send information about any technical problems with the homepage to Michael Joseph at mic@msu.edu or to me at dodgson@msu.edu.

Congratulations to Steve Kappes, who has been appointed new Director of the USDA-ARS Meat Animal Research Center (MARC) in Clay Center, Nebraska. As most readers of our newsletter know, Steve has been a leader in genome mapping studies, especially of cattle, based primarily on the research he did at MARC, and he's most recently served on the ARS National Program Staff in Beltsville/Washington D.C.

Chickens provide one of the most important and rapidly growing sources of meat protein in the world and about 41% of the meat produced in the U.S. U.S. broiler production has grown over 65% in the last decade to about 30.4 billion pounds in 2000. Per capita broiler consumption in the U.S. has grown nearly 30% over the same period (USDA Economic Research Service statistics) at a time when red meat consumption has been nearly constant. Broiler exports have increased by over 350% to over 5 billion pounds since 1990. The U.S. broiler industry produces over 7.7 billion broilers and the egg industry produces over 77 billion eggs annually. These industries are valued in excess of $14 billion and $4.5 billion, respectively.

We still have a limited supply of robot-spotted filter sets of the chicken BAC library constructed at the Texas A&M BAC Center, using UCD 001 Jungle Fowl line as its DNA source. If interested, email me at dodgson@msu.edu. The filter sets contain an array of 39,400 BAC clones with BamHI-derived inserts. A requirement for receiving a free filter set is that the user agree to provide BAC clone locations and the name of the probe used at a later date, so that all users can benefit from what has been learned. Alternatively, filter sets can be obtained directly from the Texas A&M BAC Center (http://hbz.tamu.edu) at the cost of preparing and sending them. In either case, once your clone of interest is identified by hybridization, individual clones can be obtained at cost from the BAC Center. Another 80,000 chicken BACs have now been constructed using EcoRI and HindIII insert inserts (39,400 each into pECBAC1) to insure complete coverage of the genome. We are working on the purchase of filter sets containing BACs from all three sublibraries, that will then be distributed as above. In addition, for those wishing to use PCR rather than filter hybridization to screen for your gene(s) of interest, a copy of the first 30,000 BAC library (equivalent to the filter sets first distributed) has been sent to Research Genetics, who are constructing PCR-ready, superplate, column, and row pool DNAs. Unfortunately, due to personnel turnover and other delays at Research Genetics, these BAC DNA pools are still not available, although we've been told to expect them very soon. So we hope to be able to add information about these pools to the "Resources" section of our homepage (http://poultry.mph.msu.edu/resources/resources.htm) in the very near future. As noted previously, Martien Groenen and Richard Crooijmans have also constructed a BAC library in collaboration with this the Texas A&M BAC Center (Crooijmans et al., Mammalian Genome 11: 360-363, 2000). This library consists of approximately 50,000 BACs (HindIII inserts, average: 130 kb). See http://www.zod.wau.nl/vf/research/chicken/frame_chicken.html for more information. If you wish to purchase or use the Groenen-Crooijmans library, either contact the Texas A&M BAC Center (http://hbz.tamu.edu), the Groenen site URL given above, or the UK Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Center at http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk who sell filter sets of this library.

email: dodgson@msu.edu

email: hcheng@msu.edu