Research: Determining the gender of chicken embryos

A new method to determine the gender of chicken embryos has been determined by a USPOULTRY and USPOULTRY Foundation funded research project.

The project is part of the Association’s comprehensive research program encompassing all phases of poultry and egg production and processing. In the recently completed research project, researchers at the University of Delaware, led by Dr. S. Golovan, successfully developed a first-generation prototype of an imaging system to determine fertilization and gender of chicken embryos.

The system uses machine vision hardware and algorithms in a light environment to image eggs during the first 30 hours of incubation. The machine proved to be 89% accurate for fertilisation and 76% accurate for sex determination in these early studies.

This process has the potential to be very useful for the poultry industry, allowing removal of infertile eggs from incubation and separation of eggs according to the sex of the embryos. Future studies will focus on improving accuracy and determination of the ideal time for imaging.

A detailed summary can be found here.