Construction and characterization of three BAC libraries for analysis of the chicken genome

Source/description: Large-insert BAC libraries have been essential components in the physical mapping and sequencing of the human genome and those of other species. Crooijmans et al. constructed a chicken BAC library with a 5.5-fold representation of the chicken genome using HindIII partial digest fragments. However, this is unlikely to provide full coverage by itself, as the use of only a single enzyme will bias against regions of the genome with unusually high or low densities of restriction sites. Kato et al. recently described a HindIII-based library of similar size, but this is not publicly available. This paper describes chicken BAC libraries constructed with three different restriction enzyme-generated inserts (HindIII, BamHI and EcoRI). Together, the three libraries should provide nearly full coverage of the chicken genome, suitable for high-resolution physical mapping and sequence analysis. All three libraries are publicly available, distributed as duplicated libraries, individual BACs and high-density colony filters. A female of the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus gallus) line UCD001 was the DNA source. A single bird from an inbred line was chosen to minimize heterozygosity that could impede eventual BAC contig assembly using fingerprint analysis. In addition, comparison of the UCD001 sequence to numerous available White Leghorn accessions should generate dense single-nucleotide polymorphism coverage of the genome...