Hugely improved annotation of the chicken genome
We have used the latest long read sequencing technologies to reveal the complexity of the transcriptomes in chicken embryos and brain.
For each gene (or “locus”) in the human genome there are on average between 4 and 5 transcripts (“gene products”), whereas in farm animals this ratio is closer to 1:1. In other words, there is a lot of undiscovered complexity in the transcribed regions of the major farm animal genomes (pig, chicken, sheep and cattle). We have used the latest long read sequencing technologies to reveal the complexity of the transcriptomes in chicken embryos and brain. This approach has also facilitated the identification of non-coding RNA transcripts, including long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA).
By sequencing full length transcripts, i.e. complete sequence from one end to the other, we can be sure that we have captured the full complexity of each molecule. Using customised software, we can map these sequences to the reference genome and define complex gene structures that we simply didn’t know existed previously.
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Original publication
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Normalized long read RNA sequencing in chicken reveals transcriptome complexity similar to human. BMC Genomics 18, 1, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12864-017-3691-9