The regulatory GENomE of Swine and Chicken: functional annotation during development (GENE-SWitCH)

For both pigs and chickens, the regulatory elements active during the different developmental phases, as well as in different tissues, need to be further investigated. This is more challenging than simply identifying the genes in the genome of these species. Functional annotation of the genome is important for understanding the biology of the two species and ultimately for improvement in traits of importance of these species. Pigs and chicken are the main sources of meat production worldwide and are also frequently used as biomedical models. The aim of this study is to identify the regulatory elements that are active during different phases of development in seven different tissues of pig and chicken genomes. A bioinformatics pipeline will be developed for the analysis of DNA methylation, and for integrative and comparative analysis of the data obtained in GENE-SWitCH of pig and chicken genomes. Comparative analyses will be used to obtain insight in the evolution of regulatory elements and will provide detailed insight of the evolution of the functional genome during both development and evolution. This research is expected to deliver a standard bioinformatics pipeline for the analysis of DNA methylation data as well as a functionally annotation of pig and chicken genomes.