Figures
The silky contour feather from a Chinese Silkie chicken.
The feather is an excellent model for evolution and development. The Silkie chicken breed is fixed for the silky-feather mutation, and is named based on the fascinating silky-feather phenotype. In contrast to the closed pennaceous feathers in the wild-type, the silky-feathers lack hooklets on the distal barbules and fail to form the vane. In this issue, Feng et al. report the identification of the silky-feather mutation located in the promoter of PDSS2. This is the first report of a feather structure variation associated with PDSS2 and provides new insight into the feather morphogenesis.
Image Credit: Chungang Feng, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China
Citation: (2014) PLoS Genetics Issue Image | Vol. 10(8) August 2014. PLoS Genet 10(8): ev10.i08. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pgen.v10.i08
Published: August 28, 2014
Copyright: © 2014 Feng et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The feather is an excellent model for evolution and development. The Silkie chicken breed is fixed for the silky-feather mutation, and is named based on the fascinating silky-feather phenotype. In contrast to the closed pennaceous feathers in the wild-type, the silky-feathers lack hooklets on the distal barbules and fail to form the vane. In this issue, Feng et al. report the identification of the silky-feather mutation located in the promoter of PDSS2. This is the first report of a feather structure variation associated with PDSS2 and provides new insight into the feather morphogenesis.
Image Credit: Chungang Feng, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China