Dear Colleagues,

The past few decades have seen remarkable improvements of poultry production, such as faster growth and more egg production, driven largely by genetic selection and breeding. However, there are still concerning issues for the modern poultry industry, such as compromised meat quality and poultry health due to rapid growth, reduced tolerance to heat stress, and great loss due to infectious diseases, which are exacerbated by irreconcilable phenotype traits, noticeable global climate changes, and emerging and evolving pathogen strains. The complex genetic regulation networks consisting of alternative splicing, transcriptional factor binding, gene rearrangement, mutations and copy number changes, chromatin conformation and interactions, epigenetic changes, and diverse cellular interactions (e.g., host–pathogen interactions) pose a great challenge to improve these quantitative traits. Fortunately, with advanced techniques such as gene editing, CRISPR screening, high-throughput sequencing and machine learning, we can now solve these complex issues with improved precision and find core information among the big data with enhanced accuracy. With the aim of presenting current advances and enlightening thoughts on future prospects, this Special Issue will present a collection of papers illustrating the application of these techniques in understanding molecular mechanisms underlying critical phenotypes such as muscle growth, stress tolerance and disease resistance.

Dr. Jibin Zhang
Prof. Dr. Kichoon Lee
Dr. Hongyan Sun
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• genetics and breeding
• gene editing
• bioinformatics
• immunology
• muscle growth
• disease resistance
• stress tolerance