Cloning and sequencing of quail and pigeon prion genes.

Quail and pigeon PrP genes were cloned and sequenced. Like mammalian PrP genes, quail and pigeon genes are encoded by a single exon of a single copy gene in the genome. All of the structural features of mammalian PrP genes were found in the quail and pigeon PrP gene. Compared with the nucleotide sequences of mammalian PrP, they display generally 30% similarity. When compared with chicken PrP's DNA sequence, they show a higher homology (90%), and an even higher homology (99%) when compared to each other. A phylogenetic tree was constructed to trace the evolution of the prion gene in animals.