Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Abridged version of minutes from annual business meeting

Welcome, introductions, review of the agenda (Sue Lamont, Administrative Advisor)–

• F. Siewerdt, NIFA rep, was unable to attend and distributed report to the committee in advance
• Reviewed the process by which new members can join the group; discussed this in light of the need to recruit new members
• Reminded the group of the three types of reports to be submitted over the course of the year:
  • SAES442 – required; based on the questionnaire that documents collaborative activities among group members and stations
  • REEport – describes individual station activities; required by local experiment stations
  • Station report – a self-imposed requirement of this group
    • Group discussed the usefulness of this report; noted that some stations never submit; collective feeling is that it is helpful and should be continued
  • Prompted members to roles, responsibilities, and plan for writing the next proposal
    • Discussed objectives – need to be modified to be more contemporary
    • Writing team established: Yvonne Drecshler, Fiona McCarthy, Bindu Nanduri, Hans Cheng, Huaijun Zhou, Giri Athrey, and Brynn Voy; 2-3 group members per objective, with an overall coordinator
    • Issues, justification, new objectives sections need to be uploaded by October 15 but should be done sooner. Once this step is complete, the invitation to participate will be submitted to the experiment stations.
    • Sue has a list of writing instructions and will send to the writing team.

 NRSP8 Update (Huaijun Zhou):

• Informed group that seed funds are available to NRSP-8 members to support very small projects
• Encouraged NRSP-8 members to seek support for preliminary data generation.

Group Moved to hold next annual meeting in conjunction with PAG in San Diego. Members also discussed the advantages of having the option to attend the meeting virtually. 

Overview: Across stations, significant research progress was in the areas of 1) the genetic and functional basis disease resistance mechanisms, 2) heat stress and responses to climate change, 3) genetics and biology of muscle disorders in chicken and turkeys, 4) novel genomic resources for annotation and gene editing, 5) gut microbiota of poultry, and 6) development of new computational tools and approaches

Short-term Outcomes: None to report

Outputs: 

• Unique project-related findings
  • Identified circulating proteins and fatty acids that are diagnostic markers of ascites
  • Identified circulating metabolites that are markers of incidence of breast muscle myopathies
  • Functionally annotated gene families encoding novel deubiquitinase enzymes in the chicken genome
  • Identified traits that can be modified throuhg selective breeding to improve disease resistance
  • Established high heritability of breast muscle myopathies and identified QTL and candidate genes associated with susceptibility
  • Defined the transcriptional effects of dietary selenium in turkey liver
  • Characterized the role of host defense peptides in the yolk sac for their role in susceptibility to pathogens
  • Established routine ability to isolate and culture primordial germs cells from chickens
  • Improved workflows for predicting lncRNA and miRNA functions in chicken
• Publications
  • Members published 57 peer-reviewed journal articles, including those co-authored collaboratively by members of multiple stations within this group,as well as 3 book chapters (see attached publication list)
• Workshop
  • The annual meeting was organized and held virtually, allowing participants to share their work with both members and non-members in attendance.
•  Education and workforce training
  • Collectively, members of NC1170 trained numerous undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior and visiting scientists during this reporting period.
• Funding
  • Not all members reported funding. However, based on those who did report, membership continues to leverage the activities and collaborations of this group to garner significant external funding.

Activities:

• IA, ADOL and TAES stations maintained research populations to serve as resources for identifying genes, genetic elements and genomic regions of economic importance; as well as defining unique aspects of chicken genomic architecture.  TAES maintained flock of Greater Prairie Chickens for fertile egg production with the aim of isolating primordial germ cells for use in gene editing studies.
• DE, RVC, AK, CA conducted genome-wide association studies to identify loci associated with susceptibility to disease, stress tolerance, and composition of the gut microbiome.
• TN, WI used RNAseq to enhance functional annotation of the chicken and turkey genomes.
• AZ and CA developed and applied tools to further identify regulatory regions of poultry genomes.