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. 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. Those interested in microbial genomes, especially the genomes of agriculture-related pathogens, will be joining us this year. A number of leading lights in genomics are on the schedule, including Francis Collins, director of NHGRI; Bob Waterston, head of the Washington U. Genome Center; Ralph Greenspan (behavioral genetics of Drosophila); Tom Blundell (structure and function of the proteome); Steve Brown (ENU mutagenesis in mice); Ian Franklin (wool production genes) and Eric Green (comparative genome sequencing).

The Poultry Workshop/NC-168 meeting will begin at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 12, in order to provide more time for Station reports, guest speakers and discussing our renewals (see below), followed by a 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. session on Sunday. Plan your flights 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! A weekend-only registration rate ($175) is now 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. This year we've raised the total Jorgensen Award to $750 in support of travel, registration, and/or room and board. To compete for the award, an abstract must be submitted to PAG. A lesser amount of support will still be available for students who don't win the Jorgensen Award. If interested, please email dodgson@msu.edu as soon as possible.

USDA CSREES has made the "Program Description and Guidelines for Proposal Preparation" for the FY 2002 National Research Initiative (NRI) Competitive Grants Program available at www.reeusda.gov/nri/. The deadline for the Animal Genome and Genetic Mechanisms Program (43.0) is Feb. 15, 2002. Again this year there will be no funding for the Animal Genome: Basic Reagents and Tools Program. Funding levels remain uncertain, but grants funded by Program 43.0 are generally not expected to exceed $300,000 in total costs.

The House of Representatives has provided only $105,767,000 to the 2002 NRI. This amount is unchanged from this year's NRI budget, which was a reduction from $119M awarded in 2000. The Senate Committee, however, has recommended a NRI budget of $137M. It remains unclear what will be in the final appropriations bill, even at this late date. As one can imagine, legislative action has been significantly rearranged by various emergency deliberations. It also remains unclear what, if anything, will be done with the 2002 Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems (IFAFS) program. Public announcements of IFAFS FY 2001 Awards are expected shortly. For more on IFAFS, see http://www.reeusda.gov/ifafs/. Details on the year 2000 awards are at www.reeusda.gov/1700/programs/IFAFS/ifafsawards.htm.

The National Academy of Science's "Trends in Federal Support of Research and Graduate Education, 2001" (http://search.nap.edu/openbook/0309075890/html) provides some interesting statistics. In contrast to NIH and NSF (both of which showed big increases), USDA support for university research was up only 0.5% in constant dollars between 1993 and 1999 (USDA support peaked in 1992 and has been down to varying degrees ever since). A related figure is that Ph.D.'s awarded to U.S. citizens in the agricultural sciences decreased 3.7% in the same period. Total graduate students and those supported by Federal funds decreased at a similar rate. Conclusion: agriculture is being starved of trained scientists due to the failure of USDA research support to compete with increases in other areas of biology. Statistics aren't given for animal agriculture by itself, but one suspects the situation is worse, since crop sciences recently have benefitted from special NSF funding for plant genomics.

The USDA has released "Food and Agricultural Policy: Taking Stock for the New Century". A complete copy is available at www.usda.gov. Note that page 8 of the Executive Summary of this document contains the picture of two chicks studying the first chicken genome map poster, as taken in Hans Cheng's lab at the Avian Disease and Oncology Lab.

Meanwhile, you'll all be glad to know that one food animal genome will definitely be sequenced soon. The DOE Joint Genome Institute; U.K. Human Genome Mapping Project; Inst. of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore; Molecular Sciences Inst., Berkeley; and the Inst. for Systems Biology, Seattle; have formed a consortium (www.jgi.doe.gov/programs/fugu.htm) to sequence the Fugu genome. Fugu, or pufferfish, is the sometimes lethal Japanese delicacy widely prized by adventurous gourmands (and noted for its relatively small genome for a vertebrate).

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 limited remaining stock, we're forced to restrict availability of Kit #1/2 to only members of the NAGRP Poultry Species Committee until further notice. We're nearly out of this kit already, and, due to our reduced supply budget and the extra cost of contracting with a supplier specified by the patent holder (Marshfield Clinic), we haven't been able to replace it yet. We regret any inconvenience. Now that the 2002 FY has begun, we expect to order a new overall genome framework microsatellite kit soon. If you have specific markers you'd like to see included, please let us know. 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) 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).

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.

BBSRC-UK workshop on Chicken Genomics and Biology, Dec. 15-16, 2001, Manchester Conf. Centre UMIST, UK. See www.bbsrc.ac.uk/science/initiatives/workshops/chicken_genomics.html.

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/.

Genomics and Structural Biology for Medicine, February 2-6, 2002, Miami Beach, FL. See www.med.miami.edu/mnbws for more information.

Fifth International Symposium on Avian Influenza, April 14-17, 2002, Athens, GA. More info at http://seprl.ars.usda.gov/AI%20Symposium/avian.influenza.symposium.htm.

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.

The URL for Martien Groenen's Chicken Genome Mapping Site has changed. You can get to it through the Wageningen Animal Breeding and Genetics site at www.zod.wau.nl/vf (or www.zod.wau.nl/abg/index.html) or use www.zod.wau.nl/abg/hs/research/molecular/intro.html to go directly to it. Martien has added new information and a new look to his website. His AceDB for the Chicken Genome database server is still under construction, but parts of it are already operational and can be accessed at this site.

Poultry geneticists may also wish to browse bioinformatics tools developed for cattle by Harris Lewin at Illinois. See the ESTIMA tools for query and manipulation of the Cattle EST Database at http://keck1.biotec.uiuc.edu/cattle/cattle_project.htm and the comparative gene mapping tool COMPASS at http://keck1.biotec.uiuc.edu:8887/examples/servlets/mainpage.html. COMPASS uses the comparative human-cattle map to automatically predict the location of cattle EST or other sequences that match mapped genes in humans. The state of the chicken-human comparative map isn't quite at this level, yet, but we can hope for the future.

We still have a few of the robot-spotted filter sets of the chicken BAC library constructed at Texas A&M, using the UCD001 Jungle Fowl line as its DNA source. If interested, email me at dodgson@msu.edu. The filter sets contain arrays of 39,400 BAC clones with BamHI-derived inserts. A requirement for receiving a free filter set is that the user agree to provide the name of the probe used and clone locations at a later date, so all users can benefit from coordination resources. Alternatively, filter sets can be obtained directly from GENEfinder Genomic Resources (http://hbz.tamu.edu) at the cost of preparing them. In either case, once your clone of interest is identified by hybridization, individual clones can be obtained at cost from GENEfinder. BACs have also been constructed with EcoRI and HindIII inserts (~39,400 each into pECBAC1) to insure complete coverage of the genome. Filter sets with 60,000 BACs (20,000 from each of the three sublibraries) are on order, but have been delayed and are now expected in November.

For those wishing to use PCR rather than filter hybridization to screen for your gene(s) of interest, Research Genetics has prepared PCR-ready, superplate, column, and row DNA pools of 30,000 BamHI BACs (the same collection offered on our earlier filter sets). Research Genetics plans to make panels of these pools available for purchase directly from them. Due to delays at the company, we're hoping to generate limited numbers of aliquots of these pools that can be sent to NRSP-8 member scientists. If interested, please contact the coordinators. More information will be on our website (http://poultry.mph.msu.edu/resources/resources.htm) in the future. Martien Groenen and Richard Crooijmans have also constructed a BAC library in collaboration with Texas A&M (Crooijmans et al., Mammalian Genome 11: 360-363, 2000). For more information, see www.zod.wau.nl/vf. If you wish to purchase or use the Groenen-Crooijmans library, either contact www.zod.wau.nl/abg/hs/research/molecular/intro.html, the UK Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Center at http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk, who sell filter sets of this library, or GENEfinder Genomic Resources (http://hbz.tamu.edu).

email: dodgson@msu.edu

email: hcheng@msu.edu