Chickens in Science

[Indyshent]

Or the biohacking research that has been done on producing runs of only males or only females to improve efficiency for desired outputs.

I've heard of a project to get male egg-laying breeds to die in the shell or to bioluminesce by making them express GFP. Frankly, glowing chickens sounds like a Rule of Cool idea to me, and I'm sure there's *lots* of reasons to make them do it

As much as we talk about the "genetics", we don't actually know the reasons for given phenotypes as much as we'd like to, and fluorescent tagging may help with that. Who knows, maybe something like solving "Exactly *why* do homozygous rose comb males have decreased fertility relative to heterozygous males or those of a different comb type?" might even help answer why some human men have decreased fertility. Never know what might be an orthologue, but with almost twice as many chromosomes as us, I'm sure chickens have a lot to offer.

I thought increasing the rate of parthenogenesis might help, but alas, birds only produce (largely infertile) males via parthenogenesis. The Beltsville Small White turkey was bred to have a high instance of parthenogenesis, and as male turkeys and chickens are better meat birds, it might still be a trait to breed for in order to get a male-heavy population. It would also necessitate fewer toms to be kept around as they're only necessary to make more breeding females. With a lot of dedicated breeding or genetic manipulation, that trait could become commercially viable and might make a neat transgenic candidate into meat chickens like the CX. What might be even neater is if the process of doing this in poultry might advance understanding enough that we could do something similar in cattle. Parthenogenesis in mammals results only in female offspring so it would be a huge boon to the dairy industry.

Now, possibly whatever process we could use to create heavily skewed sex ratios in laying chickens might be later applied to mammals used in meat production. Such a process would probably involve epigenetics (like causing permanent Lyonization of the unwanted sex chromosome or perhaps removing it physically from gametic stem cell lineages).

 

[Indyshent]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...es-the-nuances-of-chicken-ldquo-speech-rdquo/

Neat article concerning studies of "Chickenese".

What's especially neat to me is that Joe Hutto describes (and could converse in) the similar language of turkeys. For wonderful reading, pick up Illumination in the Flatwoods, and watch the PBS special "My Life as a Turkey", the filming of which actually involved a replication of Hutto's original study.