Database for chicken full-length cDNAs

The generation of full-length cDNA databases is essential for functional genomics studies as well as for correct annotation of species genomic sequences. Human and mouse full-length cDNA projects have provided the biomedical research community with a large amount of gene information. Recent completion of the chicken genome sequence draft now enables a similar full-length cDNA project to be initiated for this species. In this report, we introduce the development of a chicken full-length cDNA database, which will facilitate future research work in this biological system. In this project, chicken expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were aligned onto human and mouse full-length cDNAs (or open reading frames) on the basis of their similarity. More than 588,000 chicken ESTs were aligned to similar to 170,000 full-length human and mouse templates obtained from the NEDO, RIKEN, and MGC databases. Many of these templates have known biological functions, and their orthologous chicken genes in the EMBL database are also provided in our database, which is available at http://bioinfo.hku.hk/chicken/. We will continue to collect known chicken full-length cDNAs to update the database for public use. The cDNA alignment results presented herein and on our database will be useful for animal science and veterinary researchers wishing to clone and to confirm full-length chicken cDNAs of interest.