In this study, a total of 1140 Liaoning Cashmere Goats (LCG) were genotyped for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of NFKBIA gene. There are 15 SNPs and 7 genotypes have been found, and G1547A (GG) genotype has been associated with cashmere fineness and cashmere yield. An integrated ceRNA regulatory network of NFKBIA gene was made. To prove NFKBIA and these non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) may be related to cashmere fineness, we performed qPCR on these ncRNA in LCG coarse type skin (CT-LCG) and LCG fine type skin (FT-LCG). The result of qPCR showed lncRNA XLOC_011060 and ciRNA452 are at high expression level in CT-LCG, all miRNAs appear high expressed in FT-LCG, and mir-93 was the most significant difference between CT-LCG and FT-LCG. In addition, five miRNAs were selected for qPCR in different genotypes. The qPCR results showed that mir-93 might negatively regulate cashmere fineness and mir-17-5p may play a positive role in regulating cashmere fineness of individuals with G1355A (AG) genotype. These results demonstrated that NFKBIA gene is associated with cashmere fineness of LCG and G1547A (GG) genotype is the preferred marker genotype for cashmere fineness.
Keywords: NFKBIA; cashmere fineness; circRNA; lncRNA; miRNA.