ENJOY the old bird while you can, because new, improved turkeys will be dished up for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in future.
Two teams of biologists are collaborating in a bid to unravel the 1 billion bases that make up the turkey’s 40 chromosomes. One team, led by Dave Harry of Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms in Sonoma, California, has already published the first set of 100 or so “signpost” genes – markers around which a map of the entire genome can be assembled (Genome, vol 46, p 914). Harry’s team studied 135 genes and obtained partial DNA sequences for 114…
