Presenter: Zachary Walton
Authors: Zachary Walton, Whitney Brownlee, Eric Domyan
Faculty Advisor: Eric Domyan
Institution: Utah Valley University
Domestic rock pigeons (Columbalivia) have been bred for thousands of years to display an immense variety of ornamental attributes such as feather color and color patterns. These ornamental attributes make this species an ideal candidate for experiments concerning melanin production and studying the loci that regulate the production of such variety. Melanocyte cell culture is a key step in the study of pigment production and variation. Here we present the viability of utilizing pigeon melanocytes for cell culture and RNA transfection. We adapted techniques originally developed for chicken melanocyteculture, andfind that they work very well for pigeon melanocyte culture as well. Typically, mice melanocytes are used in melanin cell culture due to the stability of the cells and widespread access to the biotechnological tools necessary to manipulate gene expression and protein production within mouse cells. However, using pigeon melanocytes in further experiments for determining the link between genes and melanin production in domestic rock pigeons is ideal as this species is the center of our research. Our results show that pigeon melanocytes can be successfully cultured via the dissection andexplantationof a pigeon embryo’s neural tube after 3 days of incubation.Further experiments have shown that coating wells with Poly-L-Lysine significantly enhances melanocyte viability.Furthermore, we find that pigeon melanocytes acquired in this manner can be successfully transfected with RNA. Future work will involve optimizing transfection techniques and attempting knock-down of candidate pigment genes using siRNA.