Chromosome rearrangements between chicken and guinea fowl defined by comparative chromosome painting and FISH mapping of DNA clones

Abstract

Chromosome homology between chicken (Gallus gallus) and guinea fowl (Numida meleagris) was investigated by comparative chromosome painting with chicken whole chromosome paints for chromosomes 1–9 and Z and by comparative mapping of 38 macrochromosome-specific (chromosomes 1–8 and Z) and 30 microchromosome-specific chicken cosmid DNA clones. The comparative chromosome analysis revealed that the homology of macrochromosomes is highly conserved between the two species except for two inter-chromosomal rearrangements. Guinea fowl chromosome 4 represented the centric fusion of chicken chromosome 9 with the q arm of chicken chromosome 4. Guinea fowl chromosome 5 resulted from the fusion of chicken chromosomes 6 and 7. A pericentric inversion was found in guinea fowl chromosome 7, which corresponded to chicken chromosome 8. All the chicken microchromosome-specific DNA clones were also localized to microchromosomes of guinea fowl except for several clones localized to the short arm of chromosome 4. These results suggest that the cytogenetic genome organization is highly conserved between chicken and guinea fowl.

Centromere positions in chicken and Japanese quail chromosomes: de novo centromere formation versus pericentric inversions

“…Nearly 85 % of the probes hybridized to quail LBCs in our experiments. This efficiency of heterologous hybridization corresponds to that previously observed for FISH with large-size chicken probes on metaphase chromosomes from different galliform species (Shibusawa et al 2001(Shibusawa et al , 2002Kasai et al 2003;Schmid et al 2005;Kayang et al 2006;Griffin et al 2008). The high-resolution comparative FISH mapping combined with fine detection of centromere positions on lampbrush chromosomes allows us to determine gene order relative to centromeres most precisely.…”

FISH on avian lampbrush chromosomes produces higher resolution gene mapping

“…The discrepancy between the present data and the earlier reported data (Shibusawa et al, 2001(Shibusawa et al, , 2004aSchmid et al, 2005) can be easily explained. Since the short arm of chicken chromosome 4 represents an ancestral microchromosome (Shibusawa et al, 2002;Guttenbach et al, 2003;Derjusheva et al, 2004;Itoh & Arnold, 2005), precise assignment of chicken 4p molecular markers by FISH to metaphase chromosomes seems to be a bit tricky. On the LBCs four BAC clones assigned to chicken 4p were mapped to lateral loops extending from four clearly separated chromomeres.…”

“…Cross-species FISH also presents an opportunity for genome evolution studies. Comparative chromosome painting applied to chromosomes of avian species belonging to diverse orders (Shetty, Griffin & Graves, 1999;Schmid et al, 2000;Raudsepp et al, 2002;Shibusawa et al, 2002Shibusawa et al, , 2004aGuttenbach et al, 2003;Kasai et al, 2003;Derjusheva et al, 2004;Itoh & Arnold, 2005) shows high conservation of synteny. More detailed analysis indicates that this conservation is mainly due to a low number of interchromosomal rearrangements (Crooijmans et al, 2001;International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2004).…”

Characterization of chromosome structures of Falconinae (Falconidae, Falconiformes, Aves) by chromosome painting and delineation of chromosome rearrangements during their differentiation

“…The GGA4 probe consistently hybridizes to a single macrochromosome and a pair of smaller chromosomes (homologous to turkey chromosome 9) in many diverged bird karyotypes ), indicating that the submetacentric chicken chromosome 4 resulted from a centric fusion between an ancestral acrocentric chromosome 4 (GGA4q) and an ancestral smaller chromosome (GGA4p) (Schmid et al 2000, Raudsepp et al 2002, Shibusawa et al 2002, 2004a. Except for a centric fusion in chromosome 4 and pericentric inversions in 13 chromosomes 6, 8 and Z, the chicken appears to retain the ancestral karyotype of many other avian orders with diploid chromosome numbers of around 80 (Schmid et al 2000, Guttenbach et al 2003, Shibusawa et al 2004b.…”