A set of testis-specific novel genes collected from a collection of Korean Native Chicken ESTs

Abstract

We report a set of testis-specific novel genes by comparing the The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) chicken gene index with the 13 132 expressed sequence tag (EST) collection from Korean Native Chicken (KNC). A total of 553 novel transcripts have resulted after comparison of our EST contigs and singlets against the chicken gene index and chicken genome sequences. Interestingly, 76% of the new genes were from testis-specific EST contigs or singlet and analysis of exon/intron structure showed that a significant number of the contigs have intronless coding regions. A large portion of the testis-specific transcripts have intronless coding region indicating that the testis-specific expression pattern is related to a group of single exon genes in the chicken. The chicken EST data that are described in this paper have been submitted to the NCBI dbEST under accession numbers CO759017– CO764274, CO765331–CO768903 and CO769672-CO773972.