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David Speed

Publications and source records attributed to David Speed.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Development of a chicken 5 K microarray targeted towards immune function.

BACKGROUND: The development of microarray resources for the chicken is an important step in being able to profile gene expression changes occurring in birds in response to different challenges and stimuli. The creation of an immune-related array is highly valuable in determining the host immune response in relation to infection with a wide variety of bacterial and viral diseases. RESULTS: Here we report the development of chicken immune-related cDNA libraries and the subsequent construction of a microarray containing 5190 elements (in duplicate). Clones on the array originate from tissues known to contain high levels of cells related to the immune system, namely Bursa, Peyers patch, thymus and spleen. Represented on the array are genes that are known to cluster with existing chicken ESTs as well as genes that are unique to our libraries. Some of these genes have no known homologies and represent novel genes in the chicken collection. A series of reference genes (ie. genes of known immune function) are also present on the array. Functional annotation data is also provided for as many of the genes on the array as is possible. CONCLUSION: Six new chicken immune cDNA libraries have been created and nearly 10,000 sequences submitted to GenBank [GenBank: AM063043-AM071350; AM071520-AM072286; AM075249-AM075607]. A 5 K immune-related array has been developed from these libraries. Individual clones and arrays are available from the ARK-Genomics resource centre.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

In-silico identification of chicken immune-related genes.

In order to increase the resources available in chicken, a large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST) project was recently undertaken, resulting in the addition of more than 330,000 sequences to the databases. With the sequencing of further EST collections, there are now more than 460,000 chicken EST sequences publicly available (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). Previous analyses of the EST data estimate that the chicken genome may contain up to 35,000 genes. However, human data indicate that there may only be around 25,000, although there may be many more transcripts than actual genes. Here we describe how we used a bioinformatics approach with this large EST collection in order to identify immune-related genes, many of which were previously unreported in the chicken. The ESTs include cytokines, chemokines, antigens, cell surface proteins, receptors and MHC-associated genes. The identification of these kinds of genes will allow further study of avian immunology and will pave the way for large-scale immune-related microarray experiments, giving new insight into functional and evolutionary studies.

Animals↗