Late-term turkey embryo liver gene expression profiling

Turkey embryos are very sensitive to perturbations in energy metabolism because they have a wider hatching window than chicken embryos. Mortality of turkey embryos during late-term incubation is high relative to chickens, and many surviving hatchlings have compromised vitality. Intestinal maturation at hatch is also crucial to survival and post-hatch performance. The study of poultry embryo metabolism during the last stages of incubation is difficult due to many shifts and changes that occur in preparation for hatching. Microarray technology is suitable to study complex biological systems like avian late-term embryonic development. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to create a customized focused oligonucleotide microarray based on chicken genome sequences that could be used to study late-term avian metabolism and intestinal maturation, and use this array to survey turkey embryos gene expression from 20 days of incubation until hatch. The key features of this microarray are that all genes present have been annotated and gene spot replication (4) within each array chip. Microarray analysis was performed on liver, pectoral muscle, hatching muscle, and duodenum Keywords: time course, embryo development Pooled samples from 6 embryos were arraged on a complete interwoven loop design where each treatment (embryonic ages 20, 22, 24, 26 and 28) was replicated 4 times (2 dye-swaps).