Distribution of Kinases in Chicken Tissue

Chicken is an important agricultural species as it is one of the most important sources of animal food worldwide. Phosphorylation is an important post-translational modification controlled by kinases, and it regulates essential cellular processes, therefore various anomalies in this modification have been implicated in animal diseases. However, kinases have never been systematically studied in chicken. Therefore, annotation of kinases in chicken is necessary for studying chicken health/disease. Here we utilized high-throughput proteomics combined with bioinformatics analysis to identify tissue-specific expression of this important class of enzymes. Specifically, we used kinase domain mapping as well as Chickspress database available at University of Arizona (http://geneatlas.arl.arizona.edu), which incorporates NCBI and Ensembl gene models along with the protein expression data obtained from specimens of multiple tissues and both genders. Moreover, we compared sequences of several previously annotated orthologues to study the conservation of ATP-binding domains in chicken kinases. Our results confirmed that chicken proteome contains multiple kinases, some of which have not been previously correctly annotated in NCBI, and that their distribution in tissues is unique.