Chicken DNA Testing with Knights Poultry and Lab: Sexing, Genetics, and Breeding Insights
In this episode of the Poultry Nerds Podcast, we sit down with Brittany from Knights Poultry and Lab in Mississippi to explore the fascinating world of chicken DNA testing. From sexing Silkies and Ameraucanas to identifying the blue egg gene, recessive white, chocolate, lavender, and even duck or emu testing, Brittany shares how she turned a personal hobby into a growing poultry lab serving breeders nationwide.
We cover:
How DNA testing helps chicken owners avoid surprises in city limits & HOAs 🏡
Why Silkies, Ameraucanas, and call ducks are common candidates for poultry testing
Step-by-step process for collecting a sample and submitting it for fast results
What DNA tests can reveal (blue egg gene, recessive white, chocolate, lavender, and more)
The future of poultry genetics, including fibro and quail egg testing
Whether you’re raising chickens for show, breeding projects, or backyard fun, this episode is packed with practical insights into poultry science, genetics, and the tools that can save you time, feed, and space.
🔗 Learn more about Brittany’s work at KnightsPoultryandLab.com
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Carey: 0:25
Hello and welcome. We are back with a fairly new nerd. We have Brittany from Knights Poultry and Lab, and they do some pretty cool stuff over there. She was telling us about it before we started recording, and we've gotten a lot of questions from our other nerds on social media about this type of testing. So Jennifer was like, Hey, let's just talk to the lady herself and see what she says. So here we are. So Brittany, if you will tell us a little bit about you and your farm.
Brittany: 1:03
So my name is Brittany. I'm with Knights Poultry and Lab. We are a little chicken farm, I guess you would say. It's more like a. A hobby here in social Mississippi, silky is our main focus. We kinda had cos for a while and Americana's I know. But then we got our first silky and oh my gosh, I became obsessed. So it's like Pokemon. You gotta collect like all the colors and all of the things. It's sad. It's sad, but they're amazing and they're very. Very easily to get attached to, and then you want'em all. So that's where that's our chickens. That's the story on how much, chickens was. And with them, that's how I actually got into DNA testing because with the silkies, it takes so long for you to actually be able to tell whether you even have, a pull or a cocker. That's like you're months down the road. So I was thinking, I was like, I'll just, learn to do this by myself, for myself, and that's how I got into it. Do you have to go to school to do
Jennifer: 2:04
it?
Brittany: 2:05
No, you don't. It is a lot. Okay, so my journey is a little bit different. Have you noticed there's so many different farms popping up that are doing the lab testing now? I'm not sure if you noticed it, but in the, okay, so in the silky community there are tons of farms that are popping up doing, the same thing that I do. Which it's super, it's fairly easy to do if you can devote the time and, a little bit of extra play money that you can actually set aside to put into it.'cause it, it's a little bit costly when you're first starting out, but it's not terrible. It. So from
Carey: 2:38
Wait. You have play money and you have chickens.
Brittany: 2:42
I know. It's really, my husband spoils me a lot.
Carey: 2:46
Okay.
Brittany: 2:46
Okay. Yeah that's where that is. Yeah. My journey's a little bit different getting into it than most of the people that are doing their labs now. Because there is a. Biologist in California that actually teaches the classes now. I started before I had found her, so I had to do a bunch of trial and error and teach myself, I guess for the most part. And it's doable. Everything's on Google. You could figure it all out if you put enough time and effort. It's like anything, you could teach yourself anything, especially with YouTube. So I pretty much had the bases down and then I found Ari with Chick Check. She's the, the biologist out in California that does the classes for anybody that's interested. I found her and we just hit it off to nerds, I guess you would say. Nerding out over. Chicken science.
Carey: 3:33
You better be careful. You might wind up with a podcast.
Brittany: 3:37
We've, we actually, she was like, it's so weird.'cause she was like, we should do a podcast. I was like, I don't know. I'm pretty nervous when it comes to talking to people. And then Jennifer reaches out like literally five days later. I'm like. I just talked to Jennifer and I think I'm gonna do a podcast with her. It's hilarious.
Jennifer: 3:58
I was like, see, I told you people wanted to know. They do. Yeah. People don't know. So Carrie and I have regular old chickens that don't need all this fancy stuff.
Brittany: 4:11
We even have DNA testing for regular old chickens too. We have the recessive white test. We have a bunch of other tests coming out. It's not, a lot of people do focus it more on silkies because there's so much, I don't know so much into Silkies, like there's so much involved in Silkies, but we have, be careful we'll start razzing on the silk silkies now. It's that's a whole new ball game right there. All on its own. The silky world is, I tell ya. Yes. But we have other tests that like the Americana people I, mines I get a lot of test requests from I mines. For the recessive white and stuff like that. So we have other tests. It's not just the DNA sexing call ducks. We have we do a lot of call ducks because I'm assuming, I don't know ducks, but from what I'm hearing from the breeders, they're so small When they're first hatch, you can't look at'em and do whatever they do to, see the check the sex because they're so small they'll in'em. So they just send in a tiny little blood sample. And then they get their results like same day.
Jennifer: 5:18
Okay, so let's back up just a minute. So you're self taught and then you got your own equipment. What all do you need in order to do this? So you don't have to give all your secrets.
Brittany: 5:28
I'm self taught up to a. Certain point. I do wanna clarify that. I did go through Chi check with Ari and do the final touches with her. But, so yeah, I do wanna give her credit where it's due, but as far as what you need to do it, your equipment wise, there's a thermocycler that you'll have to have, which is this machine right here. And then you need electro, you need your electro tank, which is right back. There. And basically it just holds a buffer and it puts the electricity through a gel that we create and it pulls the DNA to split out the different bands to show different results. I wish I would've had a gel here for y'all to see. Yeah, I know. I'm so sorry. See us. But if you're not seeing and no, yeah. Okay let me break it down. Let's see. Yeah, so you take the sample, right? Yeah. You're gonna put it in a buffer that protects the DNA and then through a machine with a different primer that targets the certain portions of the DNA that we need. It duplicates and replicates it a bunch to where there's, takes that teeny tiny sample and makes it where it's visible, it makes it larger and then you add a dye to it and then you put it through a gel with electricity, which is going to pull the strands, the different sized DNA strands. To where we can read that, if that makes any more sense. Little bit. Little bit. And then you look at it, and then you look at it with a
Jennifer: 6:58
with a light. Yeah. And then you
Brittany: 6:59
just turn on the blue light and then you can actually see the way the results are showing up, it'll show up different bands and the different number of bands means different things with different tests. Yeah.
Jennifer: 7:09
Wow. You really are a nerd.
Brittany: 7:13
That's a lot. And everybody's I bet that's I think, yeah,
Carey: 7:17
that's straight up CSI Miami Lab stuff right there.
Brittany: 7:20
I know. It's everybody's I bet that's so put up a camera. I'm like, if I put up a camera, literally all you're gonna see is me with a pipette going. Like back and forth with a it's not really that interesting. But
Carey: 7:33
look, what you should do is when you do a bunch of those,
Brittany: 7:37
yeah,
Carey: 7:38
shoot the video and then when you put it in your machine and it does whatever, shoots some video of that and stick it on TikTok.
Brittany: 7:47
I need to, people will probably
Carey: 7:48
watch it like crazy, just they say because
Brittany: 7:51
it, and I'm just like, I don't, there's, to me, because I do it like six days a week all day long, sometimes till midnight, like to me, I'm doing the same thing. It's like I don't see what's like interesting about, y'all would get so bored.
Jennifer: 8:05
You need to put like a white coat on and a hat and big glasses. Make a carrot and
Carey: 8:10
have it embroidered like you have your shirt.
Jennifer: 8:12
Yeah, and
Carey: 8:13
then you could do that and video it when you, on your order form. You could have'em like, check here if you wanted to see your order on TikTok.
Brittany: 8:24
Oh yeah. What the hell? You look for that.
Carey: 8:26
I'm gonna tell you right now, some Silky folks will pay for that. They
Brittany: 8:30
probably would. I haven't even thought about that. Like the new subscription stuff that you could do on Facebook. I say new I again,
Carey: 8:38
hey, new to you, whatever.
Brittany: 8:39
So fast. Like I have no, I know nothing about, all the Facebook stuff, but it's growing. Yeah, really good.
Jennifer: 8:47
Yeah we're not gonna be any help for that at all. So Yeah, we can't help you with that. Is this, so this lab, I am assuming you have a lab or just a room or, yeah.
Brittany: 8:57
Right now we're in just a room. We have a lab. We're still going through zoning and fighting, zoning and coding and everything to get moved into our permanent building. So right now we are just in a room waiting for. County to clear us bump,
Carey: 9:16
bump them.
Brittany: 9:16
We are months in. I'm telling you. I'm ready.
Carey: 9:19
Bump that. Just keep being a rebel.
Brittany: 9:21
Yeah, it's, it is. Ugh. It's a headache. It's a headache for sure.
Jennifer: 9:26
So what kind of tests do you do? I'm trying to visualize why somebody would need it. So you've got the. The gender.
Brittany: 9:37
Yep. Yep. We got the sexing. That's like I said, for pretty much anything. We can sex on that. But then we have like recessive white, we have blue egg jean. I did catch your podcast. I re listened to the one of that y'all had. That was pretty cool. But yeah, we can test for your blue egg to see whether you have one gene, two genes, no jeans. So that's pretty cool. A lot of people, you know with. Send in for that because with the blue Egging test, if you're wanting, okay, say you have Easter I know that y'all talked about this, could. Hatch not even being able to lay a blue egg or a colored egg period. They'll have brown eggs'cause they have no jeans in there. So instead of raising that chick up all the way through and feeding it and raising it and, months down the line till you finally get a colored egg or get an egg period, and then it's tan or whatever, we could tell you the day it's hatched. So you're not having to like, wait through that long time span and raise'em up. So that's one of our. Test another one of our tests that we're actually in working on. I don't know. I don't. It's so competitive. There's a bunch of tests that, and then it's really competitive in a weird way with all the labs. That's really weird to me. Like they, everybody tries to keep their tests that they have coming out all hush. But one of them that we do have coming or that we're planning to work on is like the blue egg in the quail, like the sell iton. That way that people can, see that before and it helps breeding programs. But stuff like that, we have chocolate test that is almost verified modeled. So where we could see if you're carrying a model gene, a chocolate gene, in case you have a, a split where you have a black bird and need to know if it carries chocolate or whatever. A bunch of different tests. It's really cool. It's really neat. The way scientists, I'm not, I don't classify my myself that way, but the way they've pinpointed all of these genes to be able to test for, it's so cool. It really is. And then, it just helps breeders to where instead of having to go through the process of breeding, months and months, generations down to see what they're producing, we can tell you the day it hatches.
Jennifer: 11:49
Wow. Can you tell like how big it's gonna be and if it'll win a show later?
Brittany: 11:55
I wish. That would be really cool. Yeah, that would be awesome. But unfortunately, no that you're gonna have to, rate'em all up and pick your
Jennifer: 12:06
unicorn. Okay. So you said silky people are probably a majority of your content. They are.
Brittany: 12:12
I would say that for our sexing, that and the Indio J, again, the tall ones,
Carey: 12:20
that's it. Indio?
Brittany: 12:21
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I did a lot of those as well for sexing. And then emu, I get a lot of emu, which you know, you can't tell on them for long time, like a year or better, and you said the call decks. Yeah, we could do any type of duck, any type of geese. Turkeys, quail, peacocks. I'm trying to think what all we can do. Pretty much any bird other than we're working on ria, we can't do RIA yet. We're working on those which are rites. But pretty much any chicken, any type of, duck, goose, Turkey, emu,
Jennifer: 13:25
Poultry, any type of poultry. Yeah. With inpatient owners, huh?
Carey: 13:32
You need to know if your little Q-tip head's gonna be a boy or a girl.
Brittany: 13:35
Okay. So in a lot of people's defense, one reason that we get so many on the sexing test is a lot of people, and why a lot of'em are silkies is because a lot of silky owners live in city limits. They're not allowed to have roosters, or they'll have HOAs, they'll live in HOAs and they can't have roosters. And they don't wanna get attached because a lot of people get really attached to their chickens. It's a whole, like when you go from we were raised with chickens, and chickens were just chickens. You know what I mean? They wasn't, there wasn't that big attachment that there is that I've come to find out now, and don't get me wrong, I love my birds, but nowadays there's a different, there's a lot of pet owners that are seriously attached to their chickens. Yes. And I get it. And that all for them. Like I get that a hundred percent. So they don't wanna get attached to their birds before they find out it's a rooster later on and have to get rid of it, essentially. So it makes sense, yeah. I'm just poking. We
Jennifer: 14:31
find out, like this day to poke
Carey: 14:33
spies. It's fun to poke at'em, but this day and age, if you live in the city and you have a silky that you love. Things identify differently nowadays.
Brittany: 14:44
That is true. Although I don't think that would hold up to, the hoa I hear they could be quite stickler. Yeah.
Carey: 14:51
Yeah. Then it just needs to become your emotional support animal.
Brittany: 14:55
I'm sure that
Jennifer: 14:56
they do need to start looking into that. I agree.
Carey: 14:59
I'm met. Somebody's done it.
Jennifer: 15:01
So walk us through, if I wanted to. I don't know, check for sexing and the blue egg gene. What? How? How do I do it? Go to your website and do what?
Brittany: 15:13
So you'd go to the website and you would create an account first and foremost, and then you would go into request tests. Right now you would have, the way that the website is set up, you'd have to place it in two different orders, but you can send the same sample. So like one sample I can run multiple tests on if you wanted multiple, but you would go in, select the test that you want, the number of tests that you need submit that and, pay for your order. At that point then I accept your order. And you're then ready to collect your samples, which is a super easy process. I know a lot of people, especially new to chicken owners, like the newer on new chicken owners, they don't like to collect blood samples, but it really is super simple. It's as easy as clipping a toenail back just a little bit and getting a piece of a coffee filter is what we actually prefer. Our method collection method, a coffee filter. Dab the blood at the end of the toe to the coffee filter and put it in a Ziploc bag, label it and send it to us in regular mail. We do suggest y'all getting a tracking number because the way the mail has been lately. That way they can see when they arrive, when their samples get here.
Jennifer: 16:23
Can it be too old or too hot or too cold or I
Brittany: 16:27
would say on, as long as it's on the coffee filter, you have at least. Several weeks to get, in case it's lost in the mail. I've had some lost in the mail for two weeks and they still are perfectly fine. There's not really a rush on that. If you send the blood in a blood tube in a PCR tube, then it spoils it gets too hot. I don't know about getting too cold. That wouldn't mean an issue that would probably just, preserve it a little bit better. But yeah, in the blood tubes, when people do blood, it can get too hot and it'll spoil. Yeah.
Jennifer: 17:01
How interesting a coffee filter bleached unbleached. Does it matter? It does not matter. I'm trying to see if I have a sample
Brittany: 17:08
here of somebody to show you. So this is like an order that somebody sent in, with their little samples and see it's just a coffee filter with a dab of blood, and that is like way more blood than we even need. We literally only need the tiniest little dab. Like it, people don't understand how little we actually need.
Jennifer: 17:29
So one or two drops?
Brittany: 17:31
Yep. Yep. Little bitty amount. Yeah, like this is a good example of how much we need to actually, and this we've already pulled a sample from, but. Teeny. I don't know if it showing it up there. Little bitty drop dot of blood. I mean
Carey: 17:47
that, that essentially looks like you take a Sharpie and dab it onto a coffee filter.
Brittany: 17:53
Exactly.
Carey: 17:54
From the people out in land, radio, land, listening.
Jennifer: 17:59
Yep. We might have to break our podcast only rules and show some pictures of this one. Okay. Carey's been on me for a while now and I just don't want comb my hair.
Brittany: 18:13
That's another good thing about, basically working for myself at home, like sweats and a t-shirt, see me. I'm good. I can just sweat some t-shirt it.
Jennifer: 18:23
Yep, I get it. So just ballpark, how much do these tests. Typically run.
Brittany: 18:28
Our regular sexing is$8 for emu, it's 12. And then our other tests, recessive white is 12 as well, and then the blue egg is 14. But all of the others, we also have a lavender. All the others will be$15 each when they come out for just the traits. We try to keep it super. Affordable for everybody.
Jennifer: 18:50
That's cheaper than feeding a bird out. Yeah. Figuring it out. And yeah.
Brittany: 18:55
And it's super quick. When you mail your samples, the longest part of the whole process. Is the mail getting me the samples? Once we get the samples here in the lab, we have, we work to get results out the same night. So they arrive to me, the mail runs here at 11 o'clock and I, we bust tail and stay up sometimes till midnight submitting, results. But we try our best to get your results in same day because that's just. I don't know. I don't like waiting. I'm impatient and I know other people are as well, and that's, it's one thing that makes us stand out because there's so many different labs is our speed of getting the results out. And we really focus a lot on customer service as well, because I don't like to just submit money to somebody and be like, okay, here's my money. I'm done. I don't like that.
Jennifer: 19:43
So your impatience is your business model. I guess
Carey: 19:49
so what she's saying is she can relate to her ideal customer.
Brittany: 19:53
Yeah.
Carey: 19:54
So she understands that they're impatient and she is too. So as soon as it arrives, she's gotta get it out.
Jennifer: 20:01
Yeah. And y'all listeners out there we're just poking fine because we have to wait with the breeze we've chosen, we have to wait months and feed them lots of feed and space in order to know if they're worth feeding out.
Carey: 20:16
Look there. There's times like I'll do on chickens. I'll do my first coal if I'm colon. Out of the hatcher, but there's times that birds, I have fed them for six months and discovered something that. Just pops out and I get so mad at myself. Yeah. I'm like, I should have known that. I should have saw that coming months ago.
Brittany: 20:42
Same with Silkies. You can like, as soon as they're hatched, you can look at skin color, you can look at the number of toes, the spacing of toes, but what you can't see until months later is how they hold their wings. Whether they're gonna be the nice. Fat type or the little scrawny ones like, it's the same with in the silky world,
Jennifer: 21:01
it's the
Brittany: 21:01
same.
Jennifer: 21:02
Yep. Yeah. What about the fibro gene? Is that a new test? They're still working on that?
Brittany: 21:08
Fibro is very complicated. I don't foresee us having it for a while. It's we are actively trying to get a grasp on it, but that fibro test. Takes so many different genes and different things into account that it's a serious test. It's gonna be hecka complicated. It is. It's a hard one. Oh, okay.
Jennifer: 21:32
That one's difficult,
Brittany: 21:33
huh? Inter
Jennifer: 21:34
those multi polygenic traits or what? Tell everybody where they can find you and all that good
Brittany: 21:41
stuff. We obviously have our page on Facebook, Knights Poultry and Lab llc. But we also have a website, which is www.knightspoultryandlab.com.
Jennifer: 21:55
Nice. That's where I found you was on Facebook. Yeah.
Brittany: 21:59
The Facebook is it's, our page is growing. Like it's really blowing my mind when we first started, I was just doing it for myself, and then I reached out to locals and then I was like I guess I, I'm already doing it for locals. I might as well offer it to the, everybody. And when I lit, started putting it out on Facebook. Holy bananas, we grew so fast. It was like we went from less, I would say probably somewhere around 700 followers. And then now it's over 4,000 followers in three months, four months. It's
Jennifer: 22:30
crazy. Okay. So if y'all haven't noticed, she has a tiny bit of an accent. She's a southern gal. And so we were talking before we hit record about hurricanes. What do you do with your silkies when a hurricane is coming? You hunker'em down. That's pretty much all you
Brittany: 22:50
can do, honestly. If you have to evacuate, I look. We have, we're not so close to the coast to where we have to deal with the surge, which is the number one problem with hurricanes. This is surge so we're not so close that the surge has never made it up to us. But as far as like the bad weather and stuff like that, all you can do is hun them babies down and pray for'em. You don't bring them inside and just line'em up. I love chickens. I do. I love chickens as much as everybody, but I
Jennifer: 23:23
not bringing'em in. Huh? It's
Brittany: 23:24
gonna have to be bad for, I'll put'em in my garage, but it's gonna have to be bad for them. Things to come in my house. That many. I got a bunch of chickens.
Carey: 23:33
She's, look, she's gonna get her favorite breeder pears.
Brittany: 23:37
Oh, absolutely. She
Carey: 23:37
go get a couple of those
Brittany: 23:39
favorites.
Carey: 23:39
Yeah. They're coming on to the arc. The rest of them.
Brittany: 23:44
Thankfully we've never had that float
Carey: 23:46
or swim baby.
Brittany: 23:48
Yeah, pretty much. You know the, I don't wanna say favorites'cause you can't say favorite.'cause as soon as you say favorites, something happens to them. The not favorites, you know those can come in. Okay. So what's your favorite color? Blue cream and black probably. I would say those are my two favorite colors. If I had to choose. Yeah. The black, is that purple
Carey: 24:10
still key
Brittany: 24:12
lavenders? Yeah, we got lavender.
Carey: 24:14
Oh really? Yeah. But is it like lavender or is it more purple? It's just
Brittany: 24:18
It's like lavender, self blue, like everything else. It's not purple.
Carey: 24:21
Nah, I need purple
Brittany: 24:23
now. Like the blue creams do have a purple hue. Pretty pretty, yeah, that'd probably be your closest to having a purple.
Carey: 24:32
Man. I bet I could find a mineral that would bring that out.
Brittany: 24:36
I bet you
Carey: 24:36
could mix it in with their feed and make it happen.
Brittany: 24:40
Yeah, you probably could. You could probably, I don't know. I'm sure they have pet safe die that you could just get a white one.
Carey: 24:47
That would be too extremist.
Jennifer: 24:51
We appreciate you coming on and talking about it. I had, I mean I just, it's not something we need and it never really occurred to me till I came across your Facebook page. Yeah. I
Brittany: 25:01
totally appreciate y'all. You have no idea. Like I was super nervous, but it's been pretty fun. Yeah.
Jennifer: 25:07
Yeah.
Brittany: 25:08
And we try
Jennifer: 25:08
to be fun.
Brittany: 25:09
Yeah.
Jennifer: 25:10
Alright, thank you. Yep. Thank.