ABSTRACT

The gene sequences of Growth hormone (GH), Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1) and

Myostatin (MSTN) were downloaded from National Center for Biotechnology Information

(NCBI) database, through Entrez of the database as non-redundant reference sequence in

FASTA format, using respective accession numbers of the various genes in the GenBank to

access the necessary gene information. They were subjected to different computational

tools, on-line softwares and programs; for Multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic tree,

BLAST-like alignment tool (BLAT), Basic Like Alignment Search Tool (BLAST)were

used to analyzed for gene number in a genome, exon type and number per gene, number of

codons per gene; gaps within the alignment of the three species for each gene; single

nucleotide polymorphism between the alignments of chicken by rabbit, chicken by sheep,

and rabbit by sheep; the conserved regions between the alignments of chicken by rabbit,

chicken by sheep, rabbit by sheep, and chicken by rabbit by sheep and other parameters by

submitting the genes respective sequences in FASTA format to the tool. Results indicated

that higher body weight and size of sheep might have been due to two categories of GH,

high gene number of GH, high exon number of GH, long sequence length of GH which

resulted to higher predicted coding sequence and higher predicted peptide size. Rabbit and

chicken never shared common ancestor in GH, the number of chromosomes GHgene

distributed in sheep genome was higher than that in rabbit and chicken, and all are found on

the opposite strand (negative). Rabbit and sheep once shared common a