Development of 112 unique expressed sequence tags from chicken liver using an arbitrarily primed reverse...

In order to provide information on chicken genome expression, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were developed from chicken liver RNAs using a method based on arbitrarily primed reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of total RNAs. The method is similar to differential display, using one base anchored oligo-d(T) reverse-primers and 20-mer arbitrary forward-primers. A purification step by single strand conformation gel electrophoresis was added before sequencing. With a ratio of 112 unique sequences out of 155, we found this method to be highly effective when compared with EST production with randomly selected clones from non-subtracted, non-normalized libraries. A large proportion of the ESTs sequenced correspond to genes involved in transcriptional and post-transcriptional events. Cytogenetic mapping was performed for a subset of ESTs and four regions of conserved synteny between chicken and human were confirmed.