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This review was invited on February 2003 and submitted on August 2003. Its publication at the present date should not diminish from its significance. Meanwhile, the chicken genome draft has been released on March 2004. On December 2004, three important articles on the chicken genome have been published in Nature:(1) Sequence and comparative analysis of the chicken genome (International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2004),(2) 2.8 million SNPs in the chicken genome (International Chicken Polymorphism Map Consortium, 2004), and (3) physical map of the chicken genome (Wallis et al., 2004). These revolutionary events point out the necessity to further study the chicken genetic variation at the level of single nucleotide polymorphism and face serious scientific challenge for the chicken geneticists.