We also identified a number of genes in this study that are associated with immune system traits in White Leghorn chickens, including JARID2, RBMS3, GPC3, SARM1, and TRIB2. A previous study has explored the effects and underlying molecular mechanisms of the JARID2 gene on leukemia cell proliferation (Su et al. 2015); the RNA binding motif single stranded interacting protein3 (RBMS3) is known to act as a tumor suppressing gene, and is a favorable prognostic marker in lung squamous cell carcinoma. Here, SARM1 is linked to leukemia.