The chicken metagenome project is about looking at the most abundant bird and food animal
in the world and important model organism and charting this unknown terrority what lives
inside its gut.
And we know that's it's important to the health of the organism of the chicken, its growth
and so forth but we really know very little about it and we now have the technology to
do a definitive job here and actually look into great detail at what lives there.
Chicken is the most abundant bird on the plant, the most abundant food animal that humans
use.
In a sense the health and welfare of the nation depend on the chicken, the chicken itself,
we eat eggs.
People even ate chicken soup on the far side of the moon, Apollo astronauts, that's what
they ate.
It gives you an idea of how important it is but the irony is that we know more about the
far side of the moon than we know about what lives inside the chicken gut.
There are hundreds of different bacteria species that live in there.
Where we've, in our initial survey, we have chosen to focus on is part of the chicken
gut call the caecum, and there are two caeca in each chicken, and these are like out pocketing's
of the gastrointestinal track.
Food passes into these and then sits there for very long periods of time before it is
then voided out of the chicken and we think this is one of the key places where a lot
of interesting things happen nutrients absorption, processing and so forth.
And it's the place in the gastrointestinal track where the microbial load is the highest
this is where the larger number and most diverse population of bacterial live.
Why we are interested in that is that this chicken gut community, this microbial plays
an important role in the health and disease of this resident host.
It plays an important role in priming the development of the gastrointestinal track,
particularly the immune system associated with the gastrointestinal track.
It plays an important role in the recovery of nutrients in food and it's clear that the
chickens are fed on this very complex carbohydrate diet and much of what's recovered from the
diet depends on those microorganisms.
What we hope is that by mining this metagenome we will find many more such enzymes that might
be present in that metagenome in small amounts and in a particular niche, but if actually
produced industrially might have important biotechnology roles, might have important
roles as food supplements for the chicken to actually improve their health and growth
rate.
We are interested in the food safety issue.
We are looking at birds that have Campylobacter and birds who don't have Campylobacter.
We hope to get clues about how Campylobacter affects the chicken microbial community, how
we might be able to better prevent Campylobacter colonisation.
There already are industrial products where you feed chickens a mixture of different microbes
to keep out Campylobacter but with better understanding of how these communities work
we may even be able to improve on those and put them on a more rational basis.
The other primary driver, apart from the scientific importance of this, is that we now have at
our disposal technologies that are absolutely amazing in terms of through put.
So we can approach this high put sequencing to get a much deeper picture, a definitive
senses if you like of what lives in the chicken gut, that far exceeds what we were capable
of doing even five years ago.
So it's the two things coming together that this well posed question and this interesting
kind of internal environment within the chicken gut that is unexplored and the availability
of new technologies to make that job attractable.