Abstract
Heat stress is one of the most severe challenges faced in livestock production in summer. Alternative splicing as an important post-transcriptional regulation is rarely studied in heat-stressed animals. Here, we performed and analyzed RNA-sequencing assays on the liver of Sprague-Dawley rats in control (22 °C, n = 5) and heat stress (4 °C for 120 min, H120; n = 5) groups, resulting in the identification of 636 differentially expressed genes. Identification analysis of the alternative splicing events revealed that heat stress-induced alternative splicing events increased by 20.18%. Compared with other types of alternative splicing events, the alternative start increased the most (43.40%) after heat stress. Twenty-eight genes were differentially alternatively spliced (DAS) between the control and H120 groups, among which Acly, Hnrnpd and mir3064 were also differentially expressed. For DAS genes, Srebf1, Shc1, Srsf5 and Ensa were associated with insulin, while Cast, Srebf1, Tmem33, Tor1aip2, Slc39a7 and Sqstm1 were enriched in the composition of the endoplasmic reticulum. In summary, our study conducts a comprehensive profile of alternative splicing in heat-stressed rats, indicating that alternative splicing is one of the molecular mechanisms of heat stress response in mammals and providing reference data for research on heat tolerance in mammalian livestock.
Highlights
The non-specific response of an organism caused by excessively high environmental temperature is called heat stress [1] and it usually occurs when the ambient temperature is above the upper critical temperature of the thermal neutral zone
Bioinformatic analysis for high-throughput transcriptome data revealed a total of 10,707 genes annotated in the liver tissues
The number of alternative splicing events under heat stress increased by 20.18%
Summary
The non-specific response of an organism caused by excessively high environmental temperature is called heat stress [1] and it usually occurs when the ambient temperature is above the upper critical temperature of the thermal neutral zone. To the best of our knowledge, the temperature–humidity index (THI) is usually used as the environmental index in heat stress studies [10]. Different species have different THI thresholds for determining the occurrence of heat stress [11]. With the development of next-generation sequencing technology, numerous studies (including our previous studies) have identified lots of heat stress-related genes using RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) [12,13,14,15,16,17], but transcriptome information is still incomplete. Alternative splicing is involved in many physiological processes, as well as responses to biotic and abiotic stresses [21,22,23,24,25]
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