Proteome analysis of chicken embryonic gonads: identification of major proteins from cultured gonadal primordial germ cells.

The domestic chicken (Gallus gallus) is an important model for research in developmental biology because its embryonic development occurs in ovo. To examine the mechanism of embryonic germ cell development, we constructed proteome map of gonadal primordial germ cells (gPGCs) from chicken embryonic gonads. Embryonic gonads were collected from 500 embryos at 6 days of incubation, and the gPGCs were cultured in vitro until colony formed.

A set of testis-specific novel genes collected from a collection of Korean Native Chicken ESTs.

We report a set of testis-specific novel genes by comparing the The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) chicken gene index with the 13,132 expressed sequence tag (EST) collection from Korean Native Chicken (KNC). A total of 553 novel transcripts have resulted after comparison of our EST contigs and singlets against the chicken gene index and chicken genome sequences. Interestingly, 76% of the new genes were from testis-specific EST contigs or singlet and analysis of exon/intron structure showed that a significant number of the contigs have intronless coding regions.