Abstract
Allelic expression imbalance (AEI) is an important genetic factor being the cause of differences in phenotypic traits that can be heritable. Studying AEI can be useful in searching for factors that modulate gene expression and help to understand molecular mechanisms underlying phenotypic changes. Although it was commonly recognized in many species and we know many genes show allelic expression imbalance, this phenomena was not studied on a larger scale in cattle. Using the pyrosequencing method we analyzed a set of 29 bovine genes in order to find those that have preferential allelic expression. The study was conducted in three tissues: liver, pituitary and kindey. Out of the studied group of genes 3 of them—LEP (leptin), IGF2 (insulin-like growth factor 2), CCL2 (chemokine C–C motif ligand 2) showed allelic expression imbalance.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11033-012-2161-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Allelic expression imbalance (AEI) is a phenomena where one of the allelic transcripts is overrepresented, relative to the other one in a gene transcript pool
Out of 29 genes analyzed in three bovine tissues, 3 showed AEI: LEP, Insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2), CCL2
The rest of the genes showed no differences between allelic cDNA ratios and genomic DNA (gDNA) ratios or the cDNA ratios did not exceed the 60 %:40 % threshold
Summary
Allelic expression imbalance (AEI) is a phenomena where one of the allelic transcripts is overrepresented, relative to the other one in a gene transcript pool. The fraction of genes showing bias between alleles in transcription ranges from 5 to 54 % [3]. The skew in allelic expression is one-directional—that is, there is a preferably expressed allele in the studied population [4]. The disproportion in allelic expression can be various—from a few percent variation, up to monoallelic expression. Further studies showed that allelic expression can be tissue-specific but not gender-specific. Experiments conducted on the basis of human global AEI analysis, showed that genes harboring differences in allelic expression in humans were more likely to show allelic imbalance in mice [1]
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