Improving structural and functional annotation of the chicken genome

Chicken is an important non-mammalian vertebrate model organism for biomedical research, especially for vaccine production and the study of embryology and development. Chicken is also an important agricultural species and major food source for high-quality protein worldwide. In addition, chicken is an important model organism for comparative and evolution genomics. Exploitation of this genome as a biomedical model is hindered by its incomplete structural and functional annotation. This incomplete annotation makes it difficult for researchers to model their functional genomics datasets. Improving structural and functional annotation of the chicken genome will allow researchers to derive biological meaning from their functional genomics datasets.;The objectives of this study were to identify proteins expressed in multiple chicken tissues, to functionally annotate experimentally confirmed proteins expressed in different chicken tissues, to quantify and assess the Gene Ontology (GO) annotation quality, and to facilitate functional annotation of microarray data.;The results of this research have proven to be fundamental resource for improving the structural and functional annotation of chicken genome. Specifically, we have improved the structural annotation of the chicken genome by adding support to predicted proteins. In addition, we have improved the functional annotation of the chicken genome by assigning useful biological information to proteomics datasets and the whole genome chicken array. The Gene Ontology Annotation Quality (GAQ) and Array GO Mapper (AGOM) tools developed in this study will sustainably continue to facilitate functional modeling of chicken arrays and high-throughput experimental datasets from microarray and proteomics studies. The ultimate positive impact of these results is to facilitate the field of biomedical research with useful information for comparative biology, better understanding of chicken biological systems, diseases, drug discovery and eventually development of therapies.;Keywords: Genome annotation, Gene Ontology, proteomics, GO annotation quality, microarray...