The Agilent Oligonucleotide Array CGH (comparative genomic hybridization) chicken microarray, with 244,000 features, is available immediately
Agilent Technologies has introduced a catalogue microarray for the study of chromosomal additions and deletions in chickens.
"This started out as a custom array, and we were getting strong enough demand to put it in the catalogue," said Jay Kaufman, Agilent senior director of marketing, genomics.
"Now, when researchers want to study copy-number variation in chickens, they can do so quickly and easily".
Martien Groenen of the Animal Breeding and Genetics Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands, has a long history of mapping and characterising the chicken genome as it relates to physical traits.
"The availability of the new 244K chicken CGH array enables us to analyse to what extent copy-number variation [CNV] contributes to phenotypic variation in chickens, a species of tremendous economic importance and also an important developmental biology model," Groenen said.
"How abundant are CNVs in the chicken genome, and what is the size distribution of identified CNVs? Are there breed-specific variations in the number and type of CNVs? What is the observed linkage disequilibrium between CNVs and SNPs? We're using the new array to investigate these questions".
Agilent has plans to commercialise additional model organism arrays throughout 2008 to assist researchers who are studying various non-human species in a variety of contexts.
