Avian stem cells

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Scientists' Transgenic Chicken Aids Embryo Research

North Carolina State University poultry scientists have developed a powerful new tool to aid the understanding of how chicken embryos develop.

The research of Dr. Paul Mozdziak, assistant professor of poultry science, and Dr. James Petitte, professor of poultry science, resulted in successfully transferring a gene into a chicken and establishing a line of chickens carrying that specific marker gene.

Currently, the chick embryo is often used as a model to understand normal and abnormal embryo development. The new lines of transgenic chicken provide a new tool that can be employed in studies aimed at understanding birth defects such as limb deformities and spina bifida. The researchers say learning the mechanisms behind how cells behave during embryo development could eventually provide clues to halting developmental disabilities and may lead to other uses not yet imagined, including improvements in human and animal health.

The research appears in the March edition of Developmental Dynamics.

"Although there are people who have made transgenic chickens before, no one has produced a transgenic chicken expressing a reporter gene that can be easily tracked," Mozdziak says. "We can now take cells from our transgenic chicken and put those cells into a chick embryo or another transgenic chicken and see how the cells behave and interact with each other."

"This tool provides the impetus to go to the next level of looking at avian stem cells in embryos, putting these stem cells in different places and seeing where they end up," Petitte says.