Transcriptome analysis reveals genes associated with wool fineness in merinos

Shengchao Ma; Li Long; Xixia Huang; Kechuan Tian; Yuezhen Tian; Cuiling Wu; Zhiwen Zhao

doi:10.7717/peerj.15327

Transcriptome analysis reveals genes associated with wool fineness in merinos

PeerJ. 2023 May 23:11:e15327. doi: 10.7717/peerj.15327. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Shengchao Ma^#¹, Li Long^#¹, Xixia Huang¹, Kechuan Tian², Yuezhen Tian³, Cuiling Wu^{1

2

3}, Zhiwen Zhao¹

Affiliations

¹ College of Animal Science, Xinjiang Agricultural University, Urumqi, China.
² Institute of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Jinan, China.
³ Key Laboratory of Genetics Breeding and Reproduction of Xinjiang Wool Sheep and Cashmere-Goat, Institute of Animal Science, Xinjiang Academy of Animal Sciences, Urumqi, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Hair/wool usually plays an important role in maintaining animal physiological activities, and the economic value of wool cannot be ignored. At present, people set higher demands on wool fineness. Hence, improving wool fineness is the concern of fine wool sheep breeding. Using RNA-Seq to screen the potential candidate genes that associate with wool fineness can provide theoretical references for fine-wool sheep breeding, and also provide us new ideas for further understand the molecular regulation mechanism of hair growth. In this study, we compared the expression pattern difference of genome-wide genes between the skin transcriptomes of Subo and Chinese Merinos. The results showed that, 16 candidate differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (Included: CACNA1S, GP5, LOC101102392, HSF5, SLITRK2, LOC101104661, CREB3L4, COL1A1, PTPRR, SFRP4, LOC443220, COL6A6, COL6A5, LAMA1, LOC114115342 and LOC101116863 genes) that may associate with wool fineness were screened, and these genes were located in signaling pathways that regulate hair follicle development, cycle or hair growth. It is worth noting that, among the 16 DEGs, COL1A1 gene has the highest expression level in Merino skins, and the fold change of LOC101116863 gene is the highest, and the structures of these two genes are both highly conserved in different species. In conclusion, we speculate that these two genes may play a key role in regulating wool fineness and respectively have similar and conserved functions in different species.

Keywords: DEGs; Merinos; RNA-Seq; Wool fineness.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Animals
Gene Expression Profiling
Sheep / genetics
Sheep, Domestic* / genetics
Transcriptome / genetics
Wool*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Agricultural science and technology innovation project of Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences (Nos. CXGC2021B20), and the China Agriculture Research System (Nos. CARS-39). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.