From: To: Epstein Jeffrey <[email protected]> Subject: Fwd: Dinochicken meeting proposal Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2012 16:37:51 +0000 Attachments: THE_DINOCHICKEN_PROJECT `SUMMIT=E2n_MEETING_PROPOSAL.docx Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: Jack Homer Date: Se tember 1 2012 12:18:37 PM EDT To: Subject: Re: Dinochicken meeting proposal Dear Jeffrey, First off, many thanks for the invitation to your ranch, I had a great time, especially spending time with you and the girls, and seeing your Cretaceous sediments and the old railroad. I don't get many chances to spend time with non paleontologists or see places and things like that these days. I talked to my post does and Co-PI when I returned and got the scoop on the transgenic chickens situation, for as you know I was very surprised to hear that such a thing existed since my co-researchers were saying they didn't. As it turns out, although there are such a thing, there is simply no established protocol to create them, and they, at present do not pass on their characteristics, so in effect are useless for our project. What it is that we need to do is to be able to target a specific region of DNA, and that technology is not yet available in birds, but is expected within a year or two, so within our time frame. We hope someone else will do it first so we can use it, as this technology (homologous recombination technology, aka knockout technology) is essential to the success of this project. We do not aim to generate chickens that express an extraneous gene (a transgene), but we plan on finding the very small changes in the regulation of existing genes that curb tail, hand, and tooth development. In order to make these very small changes in the chicken genome, homologous recombination technology needs to be developed. Anyway, this is the sort of stuff we will discuss in our summit meeting, and I very much appreciate your considering the funding of this meeting. It is obviously the mo