PAG-XII will be held January 10-14, 2004 at the usual location, the Town and Country Hotel, San Diego, CA. See www.intl-pag.org/. Abstracts are to be submitted electronically, deadline, Oct. 3. Registration is also available on-line at the site listed above. Fees are $475 (nonprofit)/$625 (industry) prior to Nov. 3 or $100 more thereafter. Student registration fee is $275 and weekend only (Fri-Sun, Jan 9-11) registration is $250. Questions can be directed to Scherago Int’l at 212-643-1750 x20 or email pag@scherago.com. The NC-1008 Multistate Research project committee that replaces NC-168 will meet concurrently, with plans to begin at noon on Saturday, January 10. PLEASE NOTE THE STARTING TIME IS EARLIER THAN IN THE PAST AND PLAN YOUR TRAVEL ACCORDINGLY. The National Animal Genome Research Program, NRSP-8, will also meet concurrently with PAG-XII. The NAGRP business meeting will be on Monday evening.

The President's FY 2004 budget proposed $200M for the USDA NRI competitive grants program, whereas, so far, the House has passed an allocation of $149.2M for NRI (down from $160M last year). The Senate Committee report recommends $180M, but the Senate bill has not yet passed. Eventually, a conference committee will likely set NRI funding somewhere in between the current House/Senate range. From the NRI website (www.reeusda.gov/nri/): "CSREES Administrator Colien Hefferan announced . . . that the FY 2004 NRI RFA would be delayed due to changes in the program’s size and scope that were authorized by Congress in FY 2003. The changes included increased funding, coupled with an opportunity to use as much as 20% of the total available funding to support integrated research, education, and extension activities. In FY 2004, the NRI will publish one consolidated RFA that will include most of the NRI portfolio of programs. The release of additional RFAs for programs offered jointly with other agencies is also planned. Revised submission deadlines will be included in the new RFA, with the earliest deadlines occurring no sooner than six weeks after publication. A projected release date for FY 2004 NRI RFA will be provided in the near future."

Poultry Genetics, Breeding and Biotechnology, edited by Bill Muir and Sam Aggrey is now available from CABI Publishing (www.cabi-publishing.org/bookshop). This compendium is a worthy successor to the classic Poultry Breeding and Genetics (Elsevier, 1990), edited by Roy Crawford, which itself was the successor to F.B. Hutt's even more classic Genetics of the Fowl (McGraw-Hill, 1949). The new book takes a unique, problems-oriented approach. Thanks and congratulations to the editors for the excellent text that they've produced.

Livestock Genomes: Sequence Annotation and Informatics Challenges, October 5-7, 2003, Del Lago Resort and Conference Center on Lake Conroe between College Station and Houston, Texas. Registration: Carla Dileo (carla-dileo@ansc.tamu.edu); Phone: 979-845-2616.

Plant and Animal Genome XII, joint with NC-1008 and NAGRP annual meetings, Jan. 10-14, 2004, Town & Country Convention Center, San Diego, CA. See www.intl-pag.org/. See above.

XXII World Poultry Conference, June 8-12, 2004, Istanbul Turkey. Email WPSA2004@WPSA2004.org. For scientific matters contact Dr. Servet Yalcin, Yalcin@ziraat.ege.edu.tr

ISAG 2004, 29^th International Conference on Animal Genetics, Sept. 11-16, 2004, Surugadai Campus, Meiji University, Tokyo, JAPAN. See http://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~isag2004/

Add ChickNET to your bookmarks: www.chicken-genome.org

The Roslin Institute and Dave Burt have established a new chicken genome web site, chickNET at www.chicken-genome.org. The site includes links to a wide variety of genomic resources, avian biology groups and societies and an excellent news/events page. Contributions of news, new sites and images are welcome and encouraged.

Microsatellite primer kits: Information on chicken microsatellite primer pairs can be found at http://poultry.mph.msu.edu/resources/microkits.htm. A version of a framework primer kit (with 147 well-spaced microsatellite marker primer pairs) called the "Comprehensive Mapping Kit #7" is available (thanks in part to a generous donation from Hy-Line International). Only this and the Population Tester Kit, designed for the rapid testing of the suitability of populations and/or chicken microsatellites for a given application, are still available, as demand has waned in recent months. If interested, contact: (dodgson@.msu.edu) or (hcheng@.msu.edu), describing your desired use of primers.

The chicken BAC library constructed at Texas A&M by Hongbin Zhang and colleagues, using (a female of) the UCD001 Jungle Fowl line as its DNA source, consists of over 115,000 BACs (~39,400 each in three sublibraries with BamHI, EcoRI and HindIII partial digest inserts, called TAM31, TAM32, and TAM33, respectively; Lee et al., Animal Genetics 34: 151). Filter sets with 36,864 BACs from the BamHI and HindIII sub-libraries are available at present, email 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 (for the list described below), 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, individual clones can be obtained for a fee from GENEfinder. Contact Felipe Santos at contact@bac-center.tamu.edu to purchase BACs.

As reported previously, Pieter de Jong (Children's Hospital of Oakland Research Institute) has completed a chicken BAC library with ~195 kb inserts (CHORI-261), using the same UCD001 source DNA. CHORI-261 has ~73,700 BACs for ~12x haploid genome coverage. Pieter has also generated a turkey BAC library (CHORI-260) using DNA from an inbred Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms bird. If interested in either library and/or filter arrays, see www.chori.org/bacpac/ and access the "Detailed List of Libraries" and/or "Screening Resources". Coordination funds have been used to purchase a limited number of CHORI-261 chicken BAC filter arrays and a set can be provided on request while supplies last (see contact info and requirements above). Pieter's group has also constructed a fosmid library using the same source DNA. If interested, contact BACPAC at www.chori.org/bacpac/. If you want to isolate single genes or small linked gene families, it may be easier to use a fosmid library (inserts ~45 kb) than to have to dissect your gene from a large BAC.

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, or the UK Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Center at http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk, who sell filter sets of this library.

Your gene/marker of interest may already have BACs identified that contain it! We've recently updated our list of over 570 different genes and markers that have now been placed on nearly 5000 specific BAC clones from the TAM31, TAM32, and CHORI-261 libraries. These are listed at http://poultry.mph.msu.edu/resources/resources.htm#bacdata. Most markers or genes used identify a contig of overlapping BAC clones that may extend 100 kb or more in either direction. These data provide the platform for assembly of the physical map and sequence of the chicken genome (see below) in addition to being a useful resource for those who wish to obtain BAC clones of their gene/region of interest.

The first BAC-based physical map of the full chicken genome will be described in an upcoming Genome Research paper by Ren et al. (in press). As a collateral resource, Hongbin Zhang and colleagues at Texas A&M have developed an on-line chicken BAC contig interface. Fingerprint data from 58,079 BACs plus BAC assignments for 367 gene/markers generates 2334 contigs, most of which include 3 to 50 BACs each (207 contigs contain 51-100 BACs and 29 contigs contain over 100 BACs). The web site can be found at http://hbz.tamu.edu - click on "Chicken" under "Integrated Physical Maps" and scroll down to "Chicken Clone -> FPC Hitting Tool" and click. Enter the ID number of any BAC and search for overlapping BACs, based on the fingerprints.

As reported previously, National Human Genome Research Institute-funded sequencing of the chicken genome is underway at the Washington U. Genome Sequencing Center (WUGSC; http://genome.wustl.edu/projects/chicken/). A "combined" approach is being taken that aims at 8X coverage of the chicken haploid genome, mostly with whole genome shotgun (WGS) reads, supplemented with directed sequencing of selected chicken BAC inserts. The sequencing libraries and most of the source BAC libraries derive from DNA from a single female of the UCD001 inbred Red Jungle Fowl line, as described above. WUGSC has also fingerprinted most, if not all, of the CHORI-261 and TAM31, TAM32 and TAM33 BAC libraries (over 187,000) and obtained over 136,000 BAC end sequences. The majority of the WGS sequences have also now been completed. As of 9/9/03, the NCBI Trace Archive (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces?) shows over 7,300,000 sequence reads from the chicken genome, indicating that ~5-6X sequence coverage has already been deposited. If you have particular sequences that you wish to find within these traces, the NCBI website can be searched by BLAST or other mechanisms (see the tips for searching at the URL given above).