Abstract
Thyroid hormone responsive spot 14 (THRSP) is a small nuclear protein that responds rapidly to thyroid hormone. It has been shown that THRSP is abundant in lipogenic tissues such as liver, fat and the mammary gland in mammals. The THRSP gene acts as a key lipogenic activator and can be activated by thyroid hormone triiodothyronine (T3), glucose, carbohydrate and insulin. Here we report that chicken THRSP is also abundant in lipogenic tissues including the liver and the abdominal fat, and its expression levels increased with sex maturation and reached the highest level at the peak of egg production. Structure analysis of the THRSP gene indicates that there is a conscious estrogen response element (ERE) located in the −2390 – −2402 range of the gene promoter region. Further studies by ChIP-qPCR proved that the ERα interacts with the putative ERE site. In addition, THRSP was significantly upregulated (P < 0.05) when chickens or chicken primary hepatocytes were treated with 17β-estradiol in both the in vivo and in vitro conditions. We therefore conclude that THRSP is directly regulated by estrogen and is involved in the estrogen regulation network in chicken.
Highlights
Nuclear hormone receptors are ligand-activated transcription factors that regulate gene expression by interacting with specific DNA sequences upstream of the target genes
The results showed that expression of Thyroid hormone responsive spot 14 (THRSP) mRNA was mainly confined to the liver and adipose tissue, where its abundance was the highest, followed by the pancreas and heart (Fig. 1A and B)
The results showed that an expected increase of 40-fold was detected in THRSP mRNA levels in the liver at 30 weeks compared with 10 weeks (Fig. 1C)
Summary
Nuclear hormone receptors are ligand-activated transcription factors that regulate gene expression by interacting with specific DNA sequences upstream of the target genes. As a thyroid hormone responsive protein, three positive TREs were identified upstream of the THRSP gene in mammalian systems[16,17,18]. Our previous work on the transcriptome of the liver in chickens showed that the THRSP gene was one of the differently expressed genes, which increased by 6.24-fold in peak-laying hens (30 weeks old) compared with pre-laying hens (20 weeks old)[27]. Many differently expressed key lipid metabolism genes in our transcriptome were reported to be involved in the estrogen regulation network, such as VTG2, ApoB and very low density apolipoprotein II (APOV1). The objective of the present study was to investigate regulatory mechanisms of THRSP in the liver of laying hens
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