CircTAF8 Regulates Myoblast Development and Associated Carcass Traits in Chicken.

Kan Li,Zhijun Wang,Yangfeng Chen,Qinghua Nie,Weichen Huang,Danfeng Cai

doi:10.3389/fgene.2021.743757

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that circular RNAs (circRNAs) play important roles in skeletal muscle development. CircRNA biogenesis is dependent on the genetic context. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the introns flanking circRNAs may be intermediate-inducible factors between circRNA expression and phenotypic traits. Our previous study showed that circTAF8 is an abundantly and differentially expressed circRNA in leg muscle during chicken embryonic development. Here, we aimed to investigate circTAF8 function in muscle development and the association of the SNPs in the circTAF8 flanking introns with carcass traits. In this study, we observed that overexpression of circTAF8 could promote the proliferation of chicken primary myoblasts and inhibit their differentiation. In addition, the SNPs in the introns flanking the circTAF8 locus and those associated with chicken carcass traits were analyzed in 335 partridge chickens. A total of eight SNPs were found associated with carcass traits such as leg muscle weight, live weight, and half and full-bore weight. The association analysis results of haplotype combinations were consistent with the association analysis of a single SNP. These results suggest that circTAF8 plays a regulatory role in muscle development. These identified SNPs were found correlated with traits to muscle development and carcass muscle weight in chickens.

Highlights

Skeletal muscle development directly impacts carcass yield for meat consumption and is affected by heredity, nutrition, breed, sex, and environment (Fortin et al, 1987; Houba et al, 2004; Halevy et al, 2006)
The electrophoresis results showed that both divergent and convergent primers could yield PCR products when cDNA was used as the template, whereas only the convergent primers could yield a product when genomic DNA (gDNA) was used as the template (Figure 1B)
RT-PCR results showed no significant difference in the expression level of circTAF8 after actinomycin D treatment

Summary

Introduction

Skeletal muscle development directly impacts carcass yield for meat consumption and is affected by heredity, nutrition, breed, sex, and environment (Fortin et al, 1987; Houba et al, 2004; Halevy et al, 2006). From a genetic point of view, muscle development is under the precise regulation of a series of specific genes and signals, mainly including the myogenic regulatory factor family and myocyte enhancer factor-2 family, the paired box transcription factors Pax and Pax, and myostatin (Pas and Visscher, 1994; Grefte et al, 2007). In addition to these coding genes, a growing number of studies have found that noncoding RNAs play important roles in muscle development (Luo et al, 2013; Cai et al, 2017; Simona et al, 2018). Studies on the mechanism whereby circRNAs regulate muscle development mainly focus on the interaction of circRNAs with miRNA (Ouyang et al, 2018a; Chen et al, 2019)

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