Susan Lamont

1. Introduction Newcastle disease is considered the number one disease constraint to poultry production in low and middle-income countries [1]. In these areas, chickens often serve as important protein sources and commodities to be sold or traded. Pathogens are not the only challenge in small-scale poultry production in these resource-limited settings. Heat stress also has a negative impact [2]. I ...

IntroductionHost defense peptides (HDPs), also known as antimicrobial peptides, are present in virtually all species of life and constitute a critical component of the innate immunity [1,2,3,4,5]. Defensins and cathelicidins represent two major families of HDPs in vertebrates [6,7,8,9,10,11]. While defensins are categorized by the presence of six conserved cysteine residues in the C-terminal matur ...

Background The chicken is an important animal for several reasons. In addition to being a major source of protein in the world, it is valuable to the understanding of genome evolution because of its relationship to mammals. The chicken genome sequence assembly was completed in 2004 with a six-fold whole genome shotgun (Sanger) coverage. It was the first avian genome to be sequenced [1] and, theref ...