As hopefully all our readers know by now, PAMG-X will again be at the Town & Country Convention Center in San Diego, CA, running from Sat., Jan. 12, through Wed., Jan. 16, 2002. 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, followed by a 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. session on Sunday. Marlene Emara (emara@UDel.Edu) and Jim Petitte (j_petitte@ncsu.edu) will again co-chair NC-168 and NRSP-8/poultry. Both NRSP-8 and NC-168 projects will need to be renewed next year, so plans for these efforts will be discussed at the meeting. Preliminary information from Marlene and Jim has already gone out.

Microsatellite primer kits: Information on microsatellite primer pairs can be found at http://poultry.mph.msu.edu/resources/microkits.htm. As noted last issue, we're nearly out of our general replacement kit #1/2 and, due to our reduced supply budget from NRSP-8 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. However, thanks to new 2002 FY NRSP-8 funds and, in part, to a generous donation from Hy-Line International, a new version of a framework primer kit (with 147 well-spaced microsatellite marker primer pairs) will be ordered very soon. It should be available within a month or two. If interested, contact: (dodgson@.msu.edu) or (hcheng@.msu.edu).

Gene primers: (Reminder) Two sets of PCR primer pairs (300 primer pairs corresponding to 300 chicken genes) 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 "Chicken Gene Primers #1 and #2" under "Resources" (scroll down) at http://poultry.mph.msu.edu.

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.

TOOL TIME: Contrary to earlier reports, it was just announced that this year there will again be funding for the Animal Genome: Basic Reagents and Tools Program. The deadline for the Tools/Reagents Program is also Feb. 15, but unlike typical Program 43.0 grants, which rarely exceed $300,000 in total costs, Tools/Reagents grants can request up to $1,000,000 in total costs. See "Supplemental Program Description FY 2002" at the web site above. Approximately, $3.0M will be expended for the Animal Genome Tools/Reagents Program.

The House and Senate compromised on a budget of $120,452,000 for the 2002 NRI. The increase from last year's $105M essentially restored the FY 2000 funding level ($119M) and presumably also allowed for the restoration of the Tools/Reagents Program noted above. The final bill also included language barring any new grants in 2002 in the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems (IFAFS) program and the Fund for Rural America. So, as usual, the Ag Appropriations Bill was a good news/bad news proposition for animal agriculture and genetics research.

The report of the National Academy of Science's Board of Agriculture on "Publicly Funded Agricultural Research and the Changing Structure of U.S. Agriculture" can be found at www.map.edu/books/0309076161/html/. One interesting fact is found in Appendix C of this report. In constant dollars, USDA funding for agricultural research declined substantially from its peak in 1976 (roughly a 20% decrease) through the last available figures (1997), during which time State Experiment Station funding increased modestly (20-30%) and private agricultural research funding more than doubled! Thus, the results of this research are now more often proprietary and directed at enhanced profit margins, rather than for the benefit of the consumer, taxpayer and small farmer. For a related but more radical perspective, see "Universities For Sale?" by Jim Patrico in Progressive Farmer at www.progressivefarmer.com/issue/1101/research/default.asp.

One more reminder that 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 go directly to it at www.zod.wau.nl/abg/hs/research/molecular/intro.html. Martien has added new information and a new look to his website.

Embrex, Inc. (Research Triangle Park, NC, www.embrex.com) has received a $4.7M grant from the Advanced Technology Program (Dept. of Commerce) to develop methods to mass produce superior poultry using avian embryonic stem cells in collaboration with Origen Therapeutics (Burlingame, CA, www.origentherapeutics.com). Embrex is presently recruiting a Principal Research Scientist to lead this project. If interested, contact dnorris@embrex.com. Thanks to Catherine Ricks, Embrex VP for Research and Development, who provided this information.

Nat Bumstead attended the 10^th International Strategy Meeting on Human Genome Sequencing (Hangzhou, China) mentioned briefly in the last newsletter (see also two reports in Science; ScienceScope, 293:1745, Sept. 7 issue; and "So Many Choices, So Little Money", by Elizabeth Pennisi, 294:82-85, October 5). Nat confirms that the Beijing Genome Institute is anxious to sequence the chicken genome, and the Chinese government is likely to provide half the needed $35M for a 4X draft sequence. Nat is working to obtain BBSRC and possible Wellcome Trust support for the other half, and Rima Zoorob is lining up a French contribution to the project. At this point, it remains unclear exactly who will do what and which chicken(s) will supply the DNA to be sequenced, but Nat has done a great job in building momentum for sequencing the chicken. He also indicates that in this plan, sequence data will be publicly available on a "same day" basis, so that everyone can access it. It seems inevitable that at least a draft sequence of the chicken genome will be obtained in the next few years.

In that same vein, at the BBSRC Chicken Genomics and Biology Workshop (Dec. 15-16 in Manchester) a consortium of European Union (especially, U. of Manchester Inst. of Science and Technology, U. of Nottingham, U. of Dundee, and the Roslin Institute) and Incyte Genomics scientists announced the sequencing of over 300,000 chicken ESTs (cDNA sequences) from a wide variety of tissues and developmental stages. Data are posted in a searchable format at www.chick.umist.ac.uk. Check out this site for information on your gene of interest (and some great chicken graphics). Thanks to William Brown of Nottingham U. and Joan Burnside (U. of Delaware) for this update. Additional sequencing updates at the BBSRC workshop were provided by Ian Dunham of the Sanger Centre ("Sequencing chromosome by chromosome") and Stephen Bates of Celera ("SNP discovery in livestock using whole genome shotgun sequencing").

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.

Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (jointly with Automation in Mapping and DNA Sequencing), Feb. 6-9, 2002, Marco Island, FL. See www.agbt.org or contact info@agbt.org.

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 chicken BAC library constructed at Texas A&M, using the UCD001 Jungle Fowl line as its DNA source, now consists of over 115,000 BACs (~39,400 each with BamHI, EcoRI and HindIII partial digest inserts to insure complete coverage of the genome). Filter sets with 36,864 BACs from each of the three sub-libraries have recently been obtained and are available (after I return from PAMG, Jan. 18). If interested, email me at dodgson@msu.edu. 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. By the way, Scott McCuine, former manager of GENEfinder, has recently moved on to the Whitehead Institute at MIT. Good luck to Scott in his new position. GENEfinder's new manager is Felipe Santos, who can be reached at contact@bac-center.tamu.edu.

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 first BAC 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).

NHGRI at NIH is setting up a BAC Resource Network that is issuing a call for requests to prepare new BAC libraries for species for which there is currently no BAC library or for which a new library is needed. For additional info, contact Jane Peterson at jane_peterson@nih.gov.

We're happy to include items of general interest to the poultry genetics community in the Poultry Genome Newsletter. Please email your contributions to us by March 15 for the next issue.

email: dodgson@msu.edu

email: hcheng@msu.edu