Poultry CRC RNA INTERFERENCE AS A TOOL FOR CHICKEN FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS

Functional analysis of newly identified genes has become a major part of genomic projects and will obviously become important for gene discovery and annotation of the recently sequenced chicken genome. Mutagenesis and transgenic approaches have become routine for functional genomic studies in species such as mice (Okabe et al., 1997), zebrafish (Gong et al., 2002) and drosophila (Link, 2002), however these techniques are still being developed for chickens and to date remain far from routine. A recent phenomenon known as RNA interference (RNAi) promises to advance the elucidation of gene function in chicken cells. We have evaluated and demonstrated the knockdown potential of both siRNA and shRNA molecules in the chicken DF1 cell line.