Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
            

CONSTRUCTION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF AVIAN MACROPHAGE EST LIBRARIES

Dept. of Animal and Food Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19717-1303

Macrophages are important modulators of the immune response. These cells are capable of many effector functions including phagocytosis, antigen degradation, processing and presentation, cytokine secretion, and tumoricidal activity. For this study, macrophages were isolated from peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL) collected from commercial broiler chickens. These macrophages were subjected to one of three treatments: non-treated or induced for two and four hours with either lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or chicken interferon gamma (IFN-g). Poly (A+) mRNA was purified from these cultures and used to direct the synthesis of double-stranded cDNA. This cDNA was used to construct three directionally-cloned, non-normalized avian macrophage cDNA libraries (Control, LPS, IFN). Sequence data generated from these libraries (1,500 EST clones (Control) and 4,000 EST clones (LPS and IFN)) was submitted for BLAST analysis. Preliminary analysis of these libraries indicates that there are inducer-dependent differences in gene expression. This study represents our initial work toward characterizing macrophage function in chickens using gene expression analyses.