ARS | Publication request: Using integrative genomics to elucidate genetic resistance to Marek's disease in chicken

Submitted to: Developments in Biologicals
Publication Type: Book/Chapter
Publication Acceptance Date: August 12, 2008
Publication Date: August 12, 2008
Citation: Cheng, H., Niikura, M., Kim, T., Mao, W., MacLea, K., Hunt, H., Dodgson, J., Burnside, J., Morgan, R., Ouyang, M., Lamont, S., Dekkers, J., Fulton, J., Soller, M., Muir, W. 2008. Using integrative genomics to elucidate genetic resistance to Marek's disease in chicken. In: Pinard M-H, Gay, C., Pastoret, P-P, Dodet, B., editors. Integrative Genomics for Disease Resistance: Animal Genomics for Animal Health. Developments in Biologicals. Basel, Switzerland: Karger. p. 365-372.

Technical Abstract: While rearing birds in confinement and at high density have proven to be very successful practices for producing poultry meat and eggs, these conditions help promote the spread of infectious diseases. Consequently, the poultry industry places great emphasis on disease control measures, primarily at the animal husbandry level. The field of genomics offers great promise to complement these current control measures by providing information on the molecular basis for disease, disease resistance, and vaccinal immunity. In this review, we briefly summarize some of our efforts to apply several genomic and functional genomics approaches to identify genes and pathways that confer genetic resistance to Marek¿s disease (MD), a herpesvirus-induced T-cell lymphoma of chickens. By utilizing the ¿top-down¿ approach of QTL to identify genomics regions, and integrating them with ¿bottom-up¿ approaches of transcript profiling and Marek¿s disease virus (MDV)-chicken protein-protein interactions, we reveal three genes that confer resistance to MD and a number of other positional candidate genes of high confidence. These genes can be further evaluated in poultry breeding programs to see if they confer genetic resistance to MD. This integrative genomics strategy can be applied to other infectious diseases. The impact of the genome sequence and other technological advancements are also discussed.