The other day the International Virtual Animal Breeding Journal Club, organised by John Cole, had its second meeting. I presented a recent paper about using genetic mapping and gene expression to find a putative causative gene for a region associated with bone strength in layer chickens. This from colleauges I know and work with, but I wasn’t involved in this work myself.

Here is the paper:

De Koning, Dirk-Jan, et al. ”An eQTL in the cystathionine beta synthase gene is linked to osteoporosis in laying hens.” Genetics Selection Evolution 52.1 (2020): 1-17.

Here are my slides:

Ian Dunn and DJ de Koning were both on the call to answer some questions and give the authors’ perspective, which, again, I thought was very useful. I hope this becomes a recurring theme of the journal club.

I chose the paper because I think it’s a good example of the QTL–eQTL paradigm of causative gene identification. We got some discussion about that. Conclusions: You never really know whether an association with gene expression is causal or reactive, unless there’s some kind of experimental manipulation. We all want more annotation, more functional genomics and more genome sequences. I can’t argue with that.

Here is the a review of layer chicken bone biology referred to in the slides, if you want to look into that:

Whitehead, C. C. ”Overview of bone biology in the egg-laying hen.” Poultry science 83.2 (2004): 193-199.

If you want to follow the journal club, see the Google group and Twitter account for announcements.