The chicken (Gallus gallus) primarily originates from the red junglefowl, which was first domesticated in Asia. The chicken is of great importance in agriculture especially in the area of meat and egg production.
It serves as a vertebrate model organism for embryology and development, study of viruses, and cancer. The genome is estimated to be around 900 Mb and consists of 32 autosomes and two sex chromosomes (Z and W).
Like in other avian species, chicken chromosomes have a great variation in size, ranging from 5 to 200 Mb. In birds, the female is the heterogametic sex with the Z and W chromosomes, while the male birds are homozygous (ZZ).
In agReg-SNPdb, we store 16,659 genes and 20,917,836 SNPs.
