Abstract
BackgroundSkeletal muscle is one of the most important economic traits in agricultural animals, especially in pigs. In the modern pig industry, lean type pigs have undergone strong artificial selection for muscle growth, which has led to remarkable phenotypic variations compared with fatty type pigs, making these different breeds an ideal model for comparative studies.ResultsHere, we present comprehensive gene expression profiling for the white (longissimus dorsi muscle) and the red (psoas major muscle) skeletal muscles among male and female fatty Rongchang, feral Tibetan and lean Landrace pigs, using a microarray approach. We identified differentially expressed genes that may be associated the phenotypic differences of porcine muscles among the breeds, between the sexes and the anatomical locations. We also used a clustering method to identify sets of functionally coexpressed genes that are linked to different muscle phenotypes. We showed that, compared with the white muscles, which primarily modulate metabolic processes, the red muscles show a tendency to be a risk factor for inflammation and immune-related disorders.ConclusionsThis analysis presents breed-, sex- and anatomical location-specific gene expression profiles and further identified genes that may be associated with the phenotypic differences in porcine muscles among breeds, between the sexes and the anatomical locations.
Highlights
Skeletal muscle is one of the most important economic traits in agricultural animals, especially in pigs
Functional enrichment analysis of differentially expressed genes Out of 4,309 high-confidence and well annotated probetargeted genes (Additional file 3: Tables S2), we identified five (0.12%), 444 (10.3%) and 1,359 (31.54%) differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the sexes and the two tissues, and among the three breeds (P < 0.05, three-way ANOVA, n = 3 per breed per sex per tissue) (Additional file 4: Tables S3), respectively
We found that the breed-specific DEGs were significantly enriched in the Gene Ontology (GO) categories of protein metabolism and RNA metabolism (Figure 2A)
Summary
Skeletal muscle is one of the most important economic traits in agricultural animals, especially in pigs. Skeletal muscle is the most abundant tissue, comprising approximately 50% of the total body mass in mammals [1] It is a motor organ, and part of the endocrine system, participating in the regulation of whole body metabolism [2]. As a highly heterogeneous tissue, is composed of a variety of functionally diverse myofibre types [3]; mainly the red (type I and IIa) and the white (type IIb) fibers. Red skeletal muscles, such as the psoas major muscles (PMM), have a higher percentage of capillaries, myoglobin, lipids and mitochondria [4], making them a better aerobic machine. Previous reports suggested that ethnic group and sex are the important factors that affect physiological and biochemical features of skeletal muscles in mammals [9,10,11,12]
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