Abstract
Animal growth and development are regulated by neural and endocrine growth axes, in which cell proliferation plays key roles. Recently, many research showed that circular RNAs were involved in hepatocyte and myoblast proliferation. Previously, we identified a circular RNA derived from the chicken GHR gene, named circGHR. However, the function of circGHR is unclear. The objective of this study was to investigate circGHR expression pattern and its roles in cell proliferation. Results indicated that circGHR was a closed-loop structure molecule, and it was richer in the nucleus of hepatocytes and myoblast. Real-time PCR showed that circGHR was increased from E13 to the 7th week in the liver but decreased in the thigh and breast muscle. The CCK-8 assay displayed that circGHR promoted cell proliferation. Simultaneously, the biomarker genes PCNA, CCND1, and CDK2 and the linear transcripts GHR and GHBP were upregulated when circGHR was overexpressed. Altogether, these data exhibited that circGHR could promote cell proliferation possibly by regulating GHR mRNA and GHBP expression.
Highlights
Animal growth and development are regulated by the neural and endocrine growth axes, including the hypothalamus, pituitary, growth hormone (GH), and target organs (Picard et al, 2002)
We found that the chicken growth hormone receptor (GHR) gene may possess a circular transcript transcribed from its 5 UTR, exon1, and exon2
The results showed that random primers had higher efficiency than the oligo(dT)18 primers, further demonstrating that circGHR was a circular molecule without poly(A) sequences
Summary
Animal growth and development are regulated by the neural and endocrine growth axes, including the hypothalamus, pituitary, growth hormone (GH), and target organs (Picard et al, 2002). GH is transported to the target organ by growth hormone binding protein (GHBP) in body fluid (Picard et al, 2002). It can combine with the growth hormone receptor (GHR) to activate the intracellular insulin-like growth factor (IGF) pathway and involve in cell proliferation and differentiation (Sperling, 2016). Many researchers identified circular RNAs (circRNAs) regulating hepatocyte and myoblast proliferation, such as circMark (Li L. et al, 2017) and circFUT10 (Li H. et al, 2017)
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