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Meeting Highlights: Plant and Animal Genome VIII and Agricultural Microbes Genome I.
Author(s) -
Wixon Joanne
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
yeast
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.923
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1097-0061
pISSN - 0749-503X
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1097-0061(200004)17:1<56::aid-yea12>3.0.co;2-h
Subject(s) - biology , genome , agriculture , computational biology , genetics , microbiology and biotechnology , evolutionary biology , ecology , gene
This year was the ®rst time that the agricultural microbe session had split away from the main PAG meeting. However, the meetings were held consecutively, in San Diego, the traditional location for this meeting. This meeting was too large for me to cover it in its entirety. Consequently, I have tried to give a brief picture of the status of research in each topic area, highlighting those talks and posters which were most relevant to our readers' interests. I have also featured only those presentations whose subject material fell within the remit of this Journal and have given more weight to those organisms in which signi®cant numbers of comparative and functional genomics studies are under way. Aquaculture This session included reports of several, diverse, ®sh and marine invertebrate genome studies. Comparative mapping data was presented for the Fugu ®sh genome by Melody Clark (MRC HGMP, UK) and for the zebra®sh genome by Angel Amores (University of Oregon, USA). An analysis of the expression levels of several genes in the muscles of cat®sh has been performed (Kim et al.). Poultry Mapping of the chicken genome is under way and work on the turkey genome map has been started. These maps are mainly used for the placement of QTL for economically important traits. A pilot study of using chicken EST primers on a range of avian species indicated that this method could aid the mapping of these species. Large-scale comparative mapping of the human and chicken genomes and Zoo-FISH of chicken chromosomes using a human chromosome 4 probe were also reported; this early data suggests that there may be a surprisingly high level of conservation of gene order. Swine The mapping of quantitative trait loci was very much to the fore, in particular that of loci affecting body composition. Several comparative mapping studies between the pig and human genomes were reported and one study comparing pig unigene ESTs to human, mouse and rat unigene ESTs provided yet more tools for these maps. There has been extensive mapping of the cattle genome and a ®rst generation comparative map of the cattle and human genomes was presented. Bob Collier (University of Arizona, USA) presented a novel study utilizing a human cDNA microarray to assess gene expression levels in bovine mammary glands, which identi®ed 1500 genes associated with milk production. A pilot study using chicken ESTs to obtain markers for goat genome mapping may prove …