POULTRY GENOME NEWSLETTER 2000,

ISSUE NO. 1, JAN. 2000

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As usual, NC-168 got an early start on Saturday, Jan. 8, continuing on Sunday until adjournment in time for the wine and cheese reception that kicked off PAG-VIII. There were about 55 attendees, and 12 stations were represented, with a couple of station reports distributed in absentia. Invited speakers included John Hardiman from Cobb-Vantress, who presented an excellent overview of the technology needs of the industry and Rob Etches of Origen Therapeutics, who outlined potential commercial applications of transgenic poultry. Guest presentations were made by Chris Ashwell (ARS-Beltsville) on the chicken leptin gene, Sandra Ewald (Auburn) on broiler MHC types, Nissim Yonash (Connecticut, who was added to our group at the business meeting) on several projects, including mutant chicken lines under investigation, and Martien Groenen. Martien's talk emphasized physical mapping efforts in his la b involving mapping and end-sequencing BACs from his library throughout the genome. Collaboration with A. Vignal is leading to a detailed integration of the genetic and physical maps by FISH localization of BACs. Detailed contig building is underway in four regions, including E29. Martien also reviewed the consensus map (see below). PAG-VIII highlights included description of new applications of chip technology by Affymetrix' Robert Lipschutz, tomato QTL cloning by Dani Zamir (Hebrew U.), applications of transgenic mice to genomics by Edward Rubin (LBNL/Berkeley), announcement of the identity of the pig RN allele-encoding gene by Leif Andersson (Uppsala), IBD and linkage disequilibrium studies in dairy cattle by Michel Georges (Liege) and narrowing of the search for the callipyge gene (sheep) to 25 kb by Noelle Cockett (Utah State). PAG-VIII attendance grew again this year to 1500 registrants plus 338 exhibitors. Industry booths more than doubled, and over 600 posters were exhibited in excellent, well-attended poster sessions. Abstracts can be viewed at the PAG-VIII website, http://www.intl-pag.org/pag. The meeting concluded with the banquet on Wednesday night, marred only by the presence of several paparazzi (who shall go unnamed). PAG was followed directly by the first Ag Microbial Genome meeting with 160 registrants, about half of whom were holdovers from PAG-VIII. Congratulations to Huaijun Zhou of Iowa State who received the Neal Jorgensen Travel Award this year in our most spirited competition yet. Steve Heller is to be congratulated for organizing another fine PAG meeting. He is already at work on PAG-IX (again in San Diego, Jan. 14-17, 2001 with the Poultry Workshop beginning Saturday evening, Jan. 13). Suggestions for next year's PAG speakers or other comments on the meeting can be emailed to dodgson@msu.edu asap or sent via the PAG website noted above. (Note in passing. The weather was excellent this year, so there were few er inquiries than usual about a change in venue. Conference organizers have looked for other sites, but there are relatively few locations with convention centers large enough for PAG, but not designed for much larger groups, and the continuing relationship with the Town & Country has led to only moderate, inflationary adjustments in the Conference hotel rate, such that a move to a new location would probably result in a quantum leap in the cost to attendees. Thus we stay in San Diego for now.)

ISAG 2000, the 27^th International Conference on Animal Genetics will be held July 22-26, 2000 at the Hyatt Regency in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Schedule and registration information are available at http://www.cvm.umn.edu/research/isag2000/home.htm. The fee for registration for ISAG members is $500 before March 31, and $750 thereafter. Grad student registration is available at $100. Hotel information is also available on the web site.

The XXI World Poultry Congress will be held in conjunction with the Poultry Science Association meeting and the 6th International Symposium on Marek's Disease in Montreal, Canada this August. PSA will begin the evening of Friday, August 18, while the Marek's Disease Symposium will begin Saturday evening and the WPC will officially open Monday evening, August 21 and run through Thursday evening, August 24. Information can be obtained at http://www.wpc2000.org or by email to info@eventsintl.com.

As noted last issue, the announcement of the 2000 USDA NRI Grants Program has been posted at http://www.reeusda.gov/nri and the deadline for the Animal Genome and Genetic Mechanisms panel is Feb. 15, 2000. Poultry geneticists are strongly encouraged to apply!! The USDA National Research Initiative-Competitive Grants Program (NRI) budget was approved at last year's $119M level. Although this is another "flat" year, at least we didn't fall back to pre-99 NRI levels. Note that Animal Genome Basic Reagents and Tools special grants are included again in this year's NRI. This program accepts proposals up to $1 million in total costs that will provide critical shared animal genome reagents to facilitate research progress in this area. Five such grants were awarded this past year involving resour ces such as new microsatellites, BAC libraries, physical and comparative maps, and EST (expressed sequence tags = sequenced cDNA library sets) banks.

Martien Groenen has completed the task of joining the three major chicken linkage maps based on the Compton, East Lansing, and Wageningen populations into a single Consensus Map, now containing a total of 1889 markers on 50 linkage groups. This will be published in the January issue of Genome Research. The new Consensus Map is also available at http://www.zod.wau.nl/vf/research/chicken/frame_chicken.html, the Groenen lab homepage, or on our own site, http://poultry.mph.msu.edu. (Look under "Resources". You may view the map on-line or download the complete map as a gif file.) Look for a free poster of the new map to be distributed later this year. Save a place on your wall!!

Russell Coleman (colemara@msu.edu) has made several changes to the Poultry Genome Mapping Homepage (http://poultry.mph.msu.edu) that we hope will improve its look and make it easier to navigate to the information you need. If you haven't visited lately, please take a few minutes and surf around our site. Forward suggestions back to Russell.

Reminder: Filter sets are still available for the chicken BAC library constructed at the Texas A&M BAC Center, using UCD 001 Jungle Fowl line as its DNA source, one of the two lines used in the East Lansing reference map backcross. Robot-spotted filter sets (containing about 30,000 of the present 38,000 BACs) have been obtained and will be available free while supplies last (email me at dodgson@msu.edu). 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 (about $400 per filter set with two spots of each clone per set). Once your clone of interest is identified by hybridization, individual clones can be obtained at cost from the BAC Center. If you'd like a complete replica o f the library for pooling or other purposes, this can also be ordered from the BAC Center at a cost of about $4000 in the U.S. Again, contact the Center if interested: http://hbz.tamu.edu. We are in the process of doubling the library in size, using different restriction enzyme sites, to insure complete coverage of the genome. More updates will follow.

As noted previously, Martien Groenen's lab has also constructed a BAC library in collaboration with the Texas A&M BAC Center . This BAC library consists of nearly 50,000 clones with average inserts of about 130 kb (about 5X coverage) in the HindIII site of pECBAC1. See the Groenen homepage at http://www.zod.wau.nl/vf/research/chicken/frame_chicken.html. If you wish to purchase or use this library, either contact the Texas A&M BAC Center (http://hbz.tamu.edu), the Groenen site above, or the UK Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Center at http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk which sells filter sets of this library.

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 Genbank DNA sequence data. See the Tables entitled "Chicken Gene Primers #1 and #2" listed under "Resources" (scroll down) on our Web Page (http://poultry.mph.msu.edu). Contact: (dodgson@.msu.edu) or (hcheng@.msu.edu).

A report from the Genetic Resources Conservation Program of the U. of California, Davis on Avian Genetic Resources at Risk: An Assessment and Proposal for Conservation of Genetic Stocks in the USA and Canada has been published. Single copies are available at no charge at http://www.grcp.ucdavis.edu. Thanks to Jacqueline Pisenti (Davis), Mary Delaney (Davis) and Bob Taylor (New Hampshire) for organizing contributions from a host of co-authors and editting this informative and attractive report.

Molecular Biotechnology Workshop, sponsored by the Food Animal Biotechnology Center, July 10-20, 2000, St. Paul, Minnesota. See http://fabctr.umn.edu/mbtw/2000.html or contact Dr. Mitchell Abrahamsen at abe@tc.umn.edu.

QTL and Marker-Assisted Selection Course, sponsored by the Food Animal Biotechnology Center, July 16-21, 2000, St. Paul, Minnesota to be taught by Joel Weller, Albert Paszek, and Yang Da. Register at http://fabctr.umn.edu/QTL.html.

International Society of Animal Genetics (ISAG 2000), Hyatt Regency Hotel, Minneapolis, MN, July 22-26, 2000. See http://www.cvm.umn.edu/research/isag2000/home.htm

Poultry Science Association Annual Meeting, August 18-20, 2000, Montreal, Quebec. Info at : http://www.psa.uiuc.edu

XXI World Poultry Congress, August 20-25, 2000, Montreal Convention Centre, Montreal, Quebec. (Held in conjunction with the PSA meeting, see above, and the 6th International Marek's Disease Symposium. See http://www.wpc2000.org or email: info@eventsintl.com

Plant and Animal Genome IX, joint with NC-168 and NAGRP annual meetings, Jan. 13-17, 2001, Town & Country Convention Center, San Diego, CA. More information above and/or see http://www.intl-pag.org. Followed immediately by Ag Microbial Genome II, Jan. 18-19, same location.

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