Support from the Houghton Trust enabled me to develop new technical skills and collaborations at The Roslin Institute, seeding new areas of research and priming an upcoming grant application. Predominantly I am a bioinformatician, but through this award I learned how to process fresh chicken whole blood for DNA extractions and the purification and isolation of white blood cells and platelets for further analysis. Purified samples were analysed by single cell RNA sequencing, recapitulating expected cell lineages and identifying breed- and cell type-specific transcription of endogenous ALV-E integrations. These findings will support a future grant application, and provided preliminary data to support a new US collaboration which has also generated exciting preliminary data in how ALV-Es are expressed in day-old chicks.
An unexpected finding came from building on my existing expertise in the analysis of endogenous retroviruses, where I identified an endogenous ALV-E variant which exactly matched the exogenous ALV-K. Expanding my search to publicly available chicken whole genomes from across the world revealed that this endogenous variant is globally distributed and may represent an endogenous origin for ALV-K. Samples collected through this award are now being used to further characterise these ALV-E/K variants.
Return to the Researcher Mobility Grants Awarded page.