Abstract
Simple SummaryThe deleted in azoospermia-like (DAZL) is an RNA binding protein coding gene in autosomal, playing important roles in testicular development and gametogenesis. In this paper, we found that DAZL is extremely highly expressed in testis compared with other organs and reaches to a peak at sex maturity (6-month old) in testis. Two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within DAZL were found to have significant effect on the variation coefficient between left and right epididymis weight.The deleted in azoospermia-like (DAZL) gene encoding an RNA binding protein is pivotal in gametogenesis in lots of species and also acts as a pre-meiosis marker. The current study was conducted to detect expression profiles and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of DAZL in sheep using qPCR, DNA-pooled sequencing, improved multiplex ligase detection reaction (iMLDR®) and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) methods. The results confirmed that ovine DAZL showed the highest expression level at six-months of age across five developmental stage. At six-month stage, DAZL expressed primarily in testis across seven tissues analyzed. The abundance of DAZL in the large-testis group is higher than that in the small-testis group although it is not significant. In addition, six SNPs (SNP1-SNP6) were identified in DAZL. Of those, SNP1 (p < 0.05) and SNP6 (p < 0.01) were significantly correlated with the variation coefficient between left and right epididymis weight (VCTW). The current study implies DAZL may play important roles in testicular development and its SNPs are associated with testicular parameters, which supply important indicators for ram selection at early stage.
Highlights
Since the intensive application of artificial insemination in animal production, males become more important than females
The results revealed that deleted in azoospermia-like (DAZL) showed the highest expression level in testis at M6, which is significantly higher than M3
The highest expression of DAZL in testis at six months in this study maybe consistent with the development of seminiferous tubules and spermatogenesis in the pubertal stage testis according to the study that reported DAZL only expressed in the cytoplasm of partial spermatogonia localized within seminiferous tubules at the pre-pubertal stage while in spermatogonia and primary spermatocyte at pubertal stage, in the cytoplasm of spermatogonia at post-pubertal stage [11,23]
Summary
Since the intensive application of artificial insemination in animal production, males become more important than females. The males with high quality semen tend to have more offspring than females, and help accelerating genetic improvement [1,2]. It is worthwhile to select elite rams with high fertility for sheep industry. Semen quantity and quality are important indices to evaluate ram fertility. Semen quantity and quality are very lowly heritable, Animals 2020, 10, 740; doi:10.3390/ani10040740 www.mdpi.com/journal/animals. Testis size is easy to measure and has high heritability (h2 = 0.67) [5], which indicates that it is an excellent proxy to select candidate rams with high fertility. Screening genetic variations in important candidate genes related to testicular development are helpful to select elite rams at early stage
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