Abstract
The Lanzhou Fat-Tail sheep (LFTS, long fat-tailed sheep) is an endangered sheep breed in China with a fat tail compared to the traditional local varieties, Small Tail Han sheep (STHS, thin-tailed sheep) with a small tail, and Tibetan sheep (TS, short thin-tailed sheep) with a little tail. However, little is known regarding how tail fat deposition is regulated by long noncoding RNA (lncRNA). To evaluate the lncRNA and mRNA associated with tail fat deposition and development among these breeds, high-throughput RNA sequencing of three individuals each of LFTS, STHS, and TS were performed and analyzed in this study. RNA sequencing data from these three groups revealed 10 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and 37 differentially expressed lncRNAs between the LFTS and STHS groups, 390 DEGs and 59 differentially expressed lncRNAs between the LFTS and TS groups, and 80 DEGs and 16 differentially expressed lncRNAs between the STHS and TS groups (p-value < 0.05 and fold change ≥ 2), respectively. Gene Ontology and pathway analysis of DEGs and target genes of differentially expressed lncRNAs revealed enrichment in fatty acid metabolism and fatty acid elongation-related pathways that contribute to fat deposition. Subsequently, the expression of 14 DEGs and 6 differentially expressed lncRNAs was validated by quantitative real-time PCR. Finally, two co-expression networks of differentially expressed mRNA and lncRNAs were constructed. The results suggested that some differentially expressed lncRNAs (TCONS_00372767, TCONS_00171926, TCONS_00054953, and TCONS_00373007) may play crucial roles as core lncRNAs in tail fat deposition processes. In summary, the present study extends the sheep tail fat lncRNA database and these differentially expressed mRNA and lncRNAs may provide novel candidate regulators for future genetic and molecular studies on tail fat deposition of sheep.
Highlights
Lanzhou Fat-Tailed sheep (LFTS), Small Tailed Han sheep (STHS), and Tibetan sheep (TS) are famous and special sheep breeds in China
75,592,986, 88,617,414, and 83,525,778 raw reads were obtained for LFTS (LFTS-1, 2, and 3, respectively); 100,297,264, 80,848,034, and 83,364,558 raw reads were obtained for STHS (STHS-1, 2, and 3, respectively); and 78,883,006, 70,533,752, and 57,254,426 raw reads were obtained for TS (TS-1, 2, and 3, respectively) (Table 3)
The results showed that the target genes of differentially expressed long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) of LFTS vs. STHS were majorly related to oxidative phosphorylation; the target genes of LFTS vs. TS were abundant in pathways including fatty acid elongation and fatty acid metabolism; and the pathways which the STHS vs. TS target genes were mainly enriched were in fatty acid elongation (Figure 9)
Summary
Lanzhou Fat-Tailed sheep (LFTS), Small Tailed Han sheep (STHS), and Tibetan sheep (TS) are famous and special sheep breeds in China. LFTS are one of the four Chinese sheep breeds majorly raised in Northwestern China where the terrain is dry and the region is at high altitude. The famous phenotype of LFTS is their fat tail, which can sag to the hock and accumulate a lot of RNA-Seq of Sheep Tail Fat fat (Shelton, 1990; Almeida, 2011; Edea et al, 2017; Li et al, 2018a). Compared with LFTS, STHS have smaller tails and fat accumulation (Xu et al, 2017; Ma et al, 2018). Compared with LFTS and STHS, TS are relatively stronger and their tails are the smallest with less fat accumulation (Zhu et al, 2016; Zhou et al, 2017)
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