THE chicken became a member of an exclusive club this week, when an international consortium published its complete genome sequence.
The information should help to identify agriculturally important genetic traits. And because the chicken is the closest relative to mammals yet sequenced, knowing its genetic make-up could add to our understanding of mammalian evolution (Nature, vol 432, p 695). The chicken genome is much more compact than that of mammals: it has 20,000 to 23,000 genes formed from just 1 billion DNA letters, compared with about 3 billion in humans. Chickens have a similar number of genes to mammals, but…
