Development of 112 unique expressed sequence tags from chicken liver usingan arbitrarily primed reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction and single strand conformation gel purification method

in order to provide information on chicken genome expression, expressed seq uence tags (ESTs) were developed from chicken liver RNAs using a method bas ed on arbitrarily primed reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (R T-PCR) of total RNAs. The method is similar to differential display, using one base anchored oligo-d(T) reverse-primers and 20-mer arbitrary forward-p rimers. A purification step by single strand conformation gel electrophores is was added before sequencing. With a ratio of 112 unique sequences out of 155, we found this method to be highly effective when compared with EST pr oduction with randomly selected clones from non-subtracted, non-normalized libraries. A large proportion of the ESTs sequenced correspond to genes inv olved in transcriptional and post-transcriptional events. Cytogenetic mappi ng was performed for a subset of ESTs and four regions of conserved synteny between chicken and human were confirmed.