Background: Intramuscular fat content, an important meat quality trait, strongly affects flavor, juiciness, and tenderness. Sex hormones regulate lipid metabolism, and female hormones stimulate fat deposition, thereby making the female chickens always fatter than males. In this study, the effect of sex on IMF deposition was screened following transcriptomics in chickens.
Methods and results: Results confirmed significantly higher IMF content of 150-day female chickens as compared to the male chickens. The female chickens manifested higher serum TG, LDL-C, and VLDL, and significantly lower HDL-C contents than male chickens. Moreover, differential expression of genes involved in lipid metabolism were obtained in the muscle and liver between female and male chicken, which could partly interpret the possible reasons for the sex-mediated differences of IMF content. Cellular results revealed that inhibition of PLIN2 significantly inhibited chicken preadipocyte proliferation and induces apoptosis of preadipocytes, as well as promoted adipocyte differentiation.
Conclusions: According to our results, PLIN2 may be considered as a molecular marker for poultry meat quality and applying this gene in early breed selection.
Keywords: Chicken; Intramuscular fat; Meat quality; PLIN2; Transcriptomics.
© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.