Chicken Genetics

[chanceosunshine]

Where do you begin if you want to learn about chicken genetics? It's a fascinating topic and I'd like to dip my toes in and begin to learn. Reading some of these threads make my head swim and I would like to understand more.
Can anyone recommend certain books, videos, threads or other sources?
Thank you!

 

[Perris]

you need to talk to @nicalandia

 

[NatJ]

Where do you begin if you want to learn about chicken genetics? It's a fascinating topic and I'd like to dip my toes in and begin to learn. Reading some of these threads make my head swim and I would like to understand more.
Can anyone recommend certain books, videos, threads or other sources?
Thank you!

http://kippenjungle.nl/sellers/page0.html
Here is a site I have found useful.
There is one page about basic genetics and one about some aspects of chicken genetics.
By now, I find the gene table on the third page can be most useful of all, when I just want to check what a particular gene does.

http://kippenjungle.nl/kruising.html
This is a chicken genetics calculator. When you change the genes in the dropdown boxes, the little picture of the chicken changes too. It has helped me become more familiar with what some of the genes do, and how they interact. It can also be used to figure offspring from a cross, unless you already prefer to do that another way.

The book "Genetics of the Fowl" by Crawford was written many decades ago, but much of the information is still accurate. (Some things have been discovered since, so it is not entirely accurate.) It can be read online at Cornell University's website:
https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/chla2837819

Chicken genetics work about the same as most other genetics, but if you are used to mammals there is one major difference: roosters have ZZ sex chromosomes while hens have ZW. This makes sexlinked traits seem to work backwards, if you already know about them in humans or other mammals.

 

[Skyle]

I started everything by playing with the chicken calculator: http://kippenjungle.nl/kruisingCQ.html and reading here and there something on BYC and the Internet so I started getting what certain genes did. I played like, if I add this and this genes what happens? (watching at the picture of the bird), if I breed this to this what do I get? I also tried to recreate the colors of my chickens on this calculator.
Then I bought the books "genetics of chicken colours" and "genetics of chicken extremes" (also "brahma and brahma bantams" lol) from here: https://www.chickencolours.com/
These are awesome books, they explain everything really nicely. Reading books that explain the topic well it is for sure the best way to learn, you might need to read it more times, or read only few pages per time, since there are a lot of informations and, to be sure to understand well, time and patience are needed

 

[chanceosunshine]

Thank you both! I can’t wait to dive into these links and I’ll check out the books too.

The ZZ and ZW is incredibly interesting! I had no idea!