Comparative genomic analysis of growth hormone gene in geese.

To explore the mutation characteristic of growth hormone (GH) gene in geese, all the exons and introns of the gene were amplified by 20 pairs of primers, and then single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were detected by single strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) and subsequently confirmed by sequencing. There were six SNPs per 1000 nucleotides in exons compared to two SNPs per 1000 nucleotides in intron regions. The variant in exons contained only one non-synonymous mutation and three synonymous mutations. The results show that its sequence identity with chicken and duck were 77.54% and 92.38%, respectively, which may be concluded that the GH gene was highly conservative in phylogenesis, although there were differences between waterfowls and chicken in their evolution process.