ACTA VETERINARIA ET ZOOTECHNICA SINICA ›› 2019, Vol. 50 ›› Issue (9): 1775-1786.doi: 10.11843/j.issn.0366-6964.2019.09.005

• ANIMAL GENETICS AND BREEDING • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Cloning of GATA4/5/6 Genes and Their Expression Patterns in Duck Hearts and Livers during Postnatal Development

OUYANG Qingyuan, WANG Yushi, HU Shenqiang, LI Liang, LIU Hehe, HE Hua, WANG Jiwen*   

  1. College of Animal Science and Technology, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu 611130, China
  • Received:2019-02-21 Online:2019-09-23 Published:2019-09-23

Abstract: The aim of this study was to clone and analyze the complete coding region sequences of GATA4/5/6, the key genes regulating the development of duck internal organs. The relationship between mRNA expression levels of GATA4/5/6 at 0, 2, 4, 6,8 weeks old and the development of heart and liver of duck was preliminarily revealed in duck. PCR amplification and cloning were performed on the GATA4/5/6 genes of ducks, and sequence analysis was performed on the coding regions. qRT-PCR was used to detect GATA4/5/6 expression in heart and liver of ducks at 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 weeks old. The correlationship analysis between expression level of GATA4/5/6 and heart and liver weight and organ index was performed. The complete coding region sequences of duck GATA4/5/6 genes were obtained by amplification, with the length of 1 242, 1 182 and 1 173 bp, respectively. Further analysis showed that GATA4/5/6 of ducks had 2 zinc finger domains located at the N-terminal and C-terminal and one GATA-N domain. The amino acid consistency rate of GATA-N transcriptional activation domain was low among the 3 genes. The common areas of the 2 zinc finger structures in GATA4/5/6 were higher, but the zinc finger structure at the C-terminal of GATA5 and the zinc finger structure at the N-terminal of GATA6 were the sequence deleting 11 and 15 amino acids, respectively. qRT-PCR results showed that GATA4/5/6 maintained a high expression level in the heart and liver of 0-8 weeks old ducks. But, the developmental expression patterns between different genes and tissues were significantly different. This phenomenon indicated that GATA4/5/6 might have different functions. Further correlation analysis showed that the weight of duck heart and liver was significantly correlated with GATA4 expression level (P<0.01). In conclusion, the present study preliminarily revealed that the sustained and specific expression of GATA4/5/6 might be related to the development of heart and liver in postnatal ducks. Moreover, GATA4 might be particularly closely related to the development of heart and liver due to its more complete zinc finger domain.

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