Integration of transcriptome and whole genomic resequencing data to identify key genes affecting swine fat deposition

PLoS One. 2015 Apr 7;10(4):e0122396. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122396. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Fat deposition is highly correlated with the growth, meat quality, reproductive performance and immunity of pigs. Fatty acid synthesis takes place mainly in the adipose tissue of pigs; therefore, in this study, a high-throughput massively parallel sequencing approach was used to generate adipose tissue transcriptomes from two groups of Songliao black pigs that had opposite backfat thickness phenotypes. The total number of paired-end reads produced for each sample was in the range of 39.29-49.36 millions. Approximately 188 genes were differentially expressed in adipose tissue and were enriched for metabolic processes, such as fatty acid biosynthesis, lipid synthesis, metabolism of fatty acids, etinol, caffeine and arachidonic acid and immunity. Additionally, many genetic variations were detected between the two groups through pooled whole-genome resequencing. Integration of transcriptome and whole-genome resequencing data revealed important genomic variations among the differentially expressed genes for fat deposition, for example, the lipogenic genes. Further studies are required to investigate the roles of candidate genes in fat deposition to improve pig breeding programs.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adipose Tissue / metabolism*
  • Animals
  • Computational Biology
  • Down-Regulation
  • Genome*
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
  • Lipogenesis
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
  • Protein Interaction Maps
  • Sequence Analysis, RNA
  • Swine
  • Transcriptome*
  • Up-Regulation

Grants and funding

This research was financially supported by the Beijing team of the Pig Industry Technology System Innovation and National Key Technology Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2011BAD28B01). Tianjin Ninghe primary pig breeding farm provided support in the form of a salary for author ZW, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific role of this author is articulated in the author contributions’ section.