Acta Veterinaria et Zootechnica Sinica ›› 2021, Vol. 52 ›› Issue (8): 2171-2180.doi: 10.11843/j.issn.0366-6964.2021.08.010

• ANIMAL GENETICS AND BREEDING • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Mining Key Genes of Arrector Pili Muscle Development in Tibetan Sheep Based on Transcriptome Data

CHU Jinyu, LI Shaomei, YANG Ge, MOU Chunyan*   

  1. Key Laboratory of Agricultural Animal Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction of Ministry of Education, College of Animal Sciences & Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
  • Received:2020-12-30 Online:2021-08-23 Published:2021-08-21

Abstract: This study aimed to explore the molecular mechanism and key genes that affect the development of arrector pili muscle in Tibetan sheep dorsal skin. In this study, the dorsal skin tissues of 30 healthy Tibetan sheep embryos aged 75-110 days(E75-E85) were collected. The morphological changes of the arrector pili muscle on different days in the dorsal skin were observed by paraffin tissue section and hematoxylin-eosin (HE) staining. It was inferred that the key period of the occurrence of arrector pili muscle was E75-E85.RNA was extracted from 6 dorsal skin samples(E75 vs. E85, n=3), respectively, and transcriptome sequencing was carried out on the Illumina Hiseq platform. The sequencing data were qualitatively controlled, filtered and compared, and differentially expressed genes were screened. Functional annotation, enrichment analysis, protein-protein interaction network and RT-qPCR were carried out to explore the potential regulatory genes affecting arrector pili muscle development. A total of 1 159 differentially expressed genes were identified (P<0.05), 900 up-regulated genes and 259 down-regulated genes. Six differentially expressed genes were randomly selected for RT-qPCR verification, and the results were consistent with transcriptome sequencing, which indicated that the sequencing results were reliable. Forty seven non-redundant genes (such as BAMBI, TNNI3 and HOXA9, etc) in 5 biological process items and 5 signaling pathways related to arrector pili muscle development were screened through GO function annotation and KEGG enrichment analysis of differentially expressed genes. This study shows that the E75-E85 is probably the key period for the development of arrector pili muscle in Tibetan sheep skin. During this period, SPP1, BAMBI, TNNI3, HOXA9, and SOX15 may be the key genes regulating morphogenesis of arrector pili muscle in Tibetan sheep skin.

Key words: Tibetan sheep, arrector pili muscle, transcriptome, skin

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