Abstract：Poultry sex can be identified by anal swelling or other conventional methods. However, there's a problem that individuals can be injured effortlessly by anal swelling and with higher error rate for geese and pigeons especially. A new pair of primers named gCHD was designed in this study aiming at chromodomain helicase DNA binding protein 1 (CHD1) gene which links to sex of poultries and CHD1 fragments of chickens (Gallus gallus), ducks (Anas platyrhynchos), geese (Anser anser) and pigeons (Columba livia) were amplified. Via agarose gel electrophoresis, the production showed one band for male individuals and two bands for female individuals with the longer band location similar to band of males. Cloning sequence of production and sequence alignments between productions of chickens showed that the longer bands was located in Z chromosome and the shorter bands in W chromosome, named CHD1-Z and CHD1-W, respectively. In these 4 identified species, the length of CHD1-W was about 150 bp shorter than that of CHD1-Z, and the deficiency was in the 14th intron for CHD1-Z mRNA and in the 7th intron as to CHD1-W mRNA. Compared to molecular method, the correct rate of anal swelling measure for chickens, ducks, geese and pigeons were 100%, 93.75%, 87.50% and 87.50%, respectively. These results indicated that the new pair of primers gCHD could be the powerful universal primers to identify sex of poultry by counting the number of bands different between 2 sexes of poultry. This molecular sexing method can not only identify the sexes of poultry in advance for enhancing cultivation efficiency, but also provides a reliable sexing tool for specific study on specific gender of embryos.
