Guinea Fowl Genetics & Breeding

Guinea fowl, one of the domesticated galliforms birds, is important not only for economic reasons, but also for academic reasons. The certain unique characteristics of guinea fowl such as herding instinct, excellent foraging ability, hard and adaptable to harsh climate and resistance to most of the common chicken disease makes it an ideal poultry species to be reared under low input rural poultry farming system. The resistance to common chicken disease in guinea fowl makes it an ideal model for studying the mechanism of disease resistance through functional and comparative genomic studies. In present book, we have tried to give some fundamentals of genetics and breeding and discussed the various aspects of genetics including cytogenetics, immunogenetics and molecular genetics. The inheritance of certain qualitative and quantitative traits have also been covered.