By Cat Holmes
University of Georgia
Chicken isn’t just for dinner anymore. As a new university
textbook shows, biotechnology has taken this lowly bird from
the cutting board to the cutting edge.
“Chickens are used for more biotech research than any other
animal,” said Sammy Aggrey, a quantitative and molecular
geneticist with the University of Georgia poultry science
department.
The new book, “Poultry Genetics, Breeding and Biotechnology,”
edited by Aggrey and Bill Muir, a geneticist at Purdue
University, shows two distinct poultry science communities:
those who study the chicken as an agricultural commodity and
those who study the chicken to better understand human
disease.
Building a better chicken
“In the 1950s, the problem was producing enough chickens,”
Aggrey said. “Over the last 50 years, we solved that problem
but created new problems – mostly breeding problems. The first
part of the book is about those problems and issues that need
to be solved.”
The second part of the book addresses poultry diseases.
Approximately 40 percent of the meat produced in the United
States today is chicken. Because the farms necessary to meet
this demand are so large, disease transmission among the birds
and their resistance to drugs have become critical issues for
poultry scientists.
Birds for biotechnology
The final section of the book addresses poultry genetics. It’s
here that the chicken’s role in biotechnology becomes
apparent.
That role is why, Aggrey said, chickens are high on the list
of animals to be genetically sequenced for the National Human
Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), whose mission is to
understand the structure and function of the human genome and
its role in health and disease.
“One important way to understand [the human genome] is to
compare it with the genomes of different animals, such as the
chicken,” said Aggrey. “The organization of the chicken genome
is much closer to that of a human than a mouse or rat. That is
why this book is so important -– not just for poultry research
but for the entire fields of genomics and biotechnology.”
The poultry genetics ‘bible’
The idea for new textbook was hatched almost three years ago.
Since 1990, the standard book for poultry genetics
was “Poultry Breeding and Genetics,” published amid some
controversy, when Aggrey was finishing his Master’s degree at
Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
“Little did I know that I would be co-editing the next one,”
he says with a laugh.
Aggrey and Muir sought out the definitive, most current work to
be included in the new book.
“We searched scientific databases for every geneticist on earth
and what they’ve done for the past 20 years,” Aggrey said. “We
looked not simply at their reputations but at their real work.”
Once they had chosen the scientists, they paired up those
whose work was similar and each pair then wrote a chapter
together.
“If I write by myself, I write about my own work,” Aggrey
said. “When I write with my competitor, it becomes more spicy.
We may disagree here and there, or even agree to disagree but
the end product is excellent.”
The book was edited in cyberspace since the contributors hailed
from around the world. Even the editors never met face-to-face
as they compiled the book.
The result, Aggrey believes, is “fantastic.”
“The Poultry Genome Newsletter calls the book ‘a new bible for
poultry genetics,’” he said. “There is a lot of appeal for
everyone in the biotech fields, including those working on
humans.”
Copies of the book can be obtained at www.cabi-publishing.org.
(Cat Holmes is a news editor with the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
