Background: Bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4), a member of the transforming growth factor β family, is involved in a variety of developmental processes including heart, central nervous system, cartilage, and post-natal bone.Interestingly, it was recently revealed that BMP4 has the potential to induce MSC commitment to adipocyte.So far, however, not too much information reported about chicken BMP4.Methods: Based on the chicken BMP4 amino acid sequence from NCBI database, bioinformatics methods were used to analyze the structure and function of BMP4, including protein physical and chemical property, signal peptide, domain, Motif, secondary and tertiary structure and species evolutionary relations and so on.Results: Our results showed that BMP4 contains signal peptide, TGF-β domain and potential glycosylation, phosphorylation, amidation sites, but no transmembrane region.The amino acid homology between BMP4 mature peptide and template 2h62B is 91.18%.BMP4 homology between different species is 90.65%.Conclusions: Above all, chicken BMP4 have the typical structures of BMPs family, these structures lay the basis for the roles of BMP4 function, which involved in the formation of cartilage and bone, early embryonic development and the commitment of stem cells into adipocytes .