The only alternative to Li-ion batteries with comparable power, the Zebra cell (Table 2), is based on molten salt and, thus, only useful for continuous every day use.
There were Hispanics, African-Americans, Caucasians, Jews, Christians and zebra designed table cloths at Jenny's and Bruce's Thanksgiving Dinner!
The recently released zebrafinch and platypus genomes [30], [31] allowed us also to identify novel partial KLK-like sequences (zebra finch) (Table S1) which were not included in the phylogenetic analysis because they would decrease the resolution of the phylogenetic tree.
We found evidence for expression of ten different MHC related genes in the zebra finch (Table 3).
Eight of the ten (80%) primer pairs produced a polymorphic product in both populations of zebra finch (Table 4).
This finding is in line with the results of Holveck et al. (2008) who used brood size manipulation to induce developmental stress in young zebra finches (Table 2).
The MHC class I locus sequenced here thus stands in marked contrast to previously sampled putatively neutral loci in zebra finches (Table 1).
We also identified 4 K-Channel genes for which there are currently no predictive Ensembl models in zebra finches (Table 2B), consisting of 2 additional 1-to-1 orthologs and 2 more K-Channel genes that are absent in humans.
When we surveyed the songbird research community for interest in using the 20 K array, we recognized that there was considerable interest in experiments involving species other than the zebra finch (Table 7).
A large proportion (83%) of the Darwin's finch genome could be aligned to zebra finch (Table 1), consistent with their more recent ancestry than with chicken or turkey, which are both galliforms.
In the final set of 3556 genes, no such bias can be observed and - apart from a slight over-representation of genes on chromosome 2, 26 and 27 - the fraction of genes included for autosomes and the Z chromosome follows the expectation from zebra finch (Table 4 in Additional file 1).
