Serralbo, O. et al. eLife (2020) https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56312

The domestic chicken has long been a valuable model organism, but their relatively long generation time—it takes about 6 months for a hatched chicken to mature—has kept them towards the bottom of the pecking order for applying genome editing technologies. As an alternative avian genetic model with a quicker turnaround time, researchers from Monash University propose the Japanese quail, Coturnix corturnix japonica, a close relative to the chicken that matures in about six weeks.

Writing in eLife, the team describes a new method for generating transgenic quail, demonstrating its application by producing transgenic quail lines that express fluorescent reporters in different tissues. They also introduce The QuailNet Project, an online resource being developed for those interested in the quail model.