Database illustrates chicken biodiversity : International team of scientists develops publicly accessible database with 174 chicken breeds : FLI Press release 03/2019

Insel Riems/Mariensee, 6 June 2019. A total of 174 chicken breeds are contained in a publicly accessible database which scientists from the University of Göttingen and the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) in Neustadt-Mariensee have developed in recent years together with numerous partners. The Synbreed Chicken Diversity Panel (SCDP) covers the better part of the existing species diversity of chicken. In the accompanying scientific study, the researchers collected genotype information for almost 600,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 3,235 animals. SNPs are variations of single building blocks of the genome among individuals. They constructed a phylogenetic tree of unprecedented completeness and resolution. The results have been published in the journal BMC Genomics.