Mutation carriers with nonischemic cardiomyopathy we found an overlap in distribution pa ern between patients with DCM and AC and a significant higher percentage of adipose tissue in AC compared to control hearts. This method can be used to assess cardiac fibrosis and fa y tissue in a broad range of human cardiomyopathies, animal models and can serve as gold standard for noninvasive imaging techniques. Research into the development, structure and function of different aspects of metazoan biology has been greatly assisted by the genomics tools that have become available over the last several years. In addition to the sequence of bases that constitute a genome, the locations and boundaries of genes and their exons must also be identified. Furthermore, many genes exhibit alternate splicing such that a few exons may exhibit a large degree of combinatorial possibilities. These transcript isoforms must also be detected in order to have a thorough set of genome resources. This annotation process typically requires a combination of computational and experimental approaches. All of the important work being done now to uncover the regulatory mechanisms that control when and how genes are active rely heavily on a foundation built with solid genome assemblies and annotations. Humans and several key model organisms have quite good genome assemblies with other associated resources including high quality Praeruptorin-B annotations for transcript isoforms and even the locations of functional regulatory elements in various cell and tissue types. The RefSeq annotations are well-founded but only contain a fraction of the total number of genes and isoforms. The Ensembl annotation is much more thorough but is not yet complete as it does not contain annotations for regions seen to be transcribed in previously-published data. The current annotations also contain fewer genes and isoforms than those of the more complete human and mouse genomes, though it is possible that there are systematic differences in the number of alternate isoforms seen in avian and mammalian genomes. The chicken has been used as a model for embryogenesis for thousands of years, and notable scientists such as Aristotle, Harvey, Pasteur and Darwin used chickens as models for embryology, circulation, infection and evolution. The chicken continues to be an extremely useful model organism in many areas including aiding our understand of the molecular mechanisms behind heart development. For these reasons a collaboration was created between the Cardiovascular Development Consortium of the Bench to Bassinet Program and Pacific Biosciences to help improve the chicken genome annotation. By generating new long-read sequences and incorporating existing short-read and EST sequences, we Isochlorogenic-acid-C identified thousands of transcript isoforms as well as hundreds of genes not currently included in the Ensembl annotations. It is our expectation that the results presented here will serve as a resource for the community of researchers who rely on the chicken genome, and that our methodology will help others whose goal it is to improve the annotations of other model organism genomes.