The chicken is historically the most commonly used avian model system, notably for embryological studies. Recognizing the limits of the chicken, whose adults require large enclosure and bear a slow generation cycle, for modern developmental genetics studies a number of labs have started to develop genomics and molecular genetic resources for the quail, as an alternative avian model to chicken. QuailNet aims at centralizing such resources and relevant information to make them available to the community.

Quails are lab-sized animals, which can be housed in settings very similar to large rodents. Quail has a generation cycle of ~2.5 months, very similar to mice and much shorter than chickens (~6 months). These two decisive advantages make the quail a much more tractable lab animal model than the chicken. As showcased on this website, a number of transgenic or mutant quail lines have been generated by different labs worldwide. Importantly, the quail (Coturnix japonica) genome has been sequenced, assembled and annotated and it is featured on this website. This should greatly facilitate the design of CrispR-Cas9-based approaches in this organism.

The data originates from the community of researchers using quail as model. If you have generated a new transgenic line, a set of RNAseq data or any type of information/data that you think is relevant to quail, please contact us. We will provide you an access to the website and help you uploading your infos.

This project takes its origin from concerted efforts between David Salgado (Bioinformatician at the Aix-Marseille University, France, designer of QuailNet) and Jerôme Gros (developmental biologist at the Pasteur Institut in Paris, France, using quail as animal model), later joined by Christophe Marcelle and Olivier Serralbo (developmental biologists at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia and Lyon University, France) whom started a transgenic quail facility at Monash. If you want to get involved, do not hesitate to contact us.