Abstract
Fat metabolism is a complicated process regulated by a series of factors. microRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of negative regulator of proteins and play crucial roles in many biological processes; including fat metabolism. Although there have been some researches indicating that miRNAs could influence the milk fat metabolism through targeting some factors, little is known about the effect of miRNAs on goat milk fat metabolism. Here we utilized an improved miRNA detection assay, S-Poly-(T), to profile the expression of miRNAs in the goat mammary gland in different periods, and found that miR-130b was abundantly and differentially expressed in goat mammary gland. Additionally, overexpressing miR-130b impaired adipogenesis while inhibiting miR-130b enhanced adipogenesis in goat mammary epithelial cells. Utilizing 3’-UTR assay and Western Blot analusis, the protein peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor coactivator-1α (PGC1α), a major regulator of fat metabolism, was demonstrated to be a potential target of miR-130b. Interestingly, miR-130b potently repressed PGC1α expression by targeting both the PGC1α mRNA coding and 3’ untranslated regions. These findings have some insight of miR-130b in mediating adipocyte differentiation by repressing PGC1α expression and this contributes to further understanding about the functional significance of miRNAs in milk fat synthesis.
Highlights
Goat milk contains a large number of short chain fatty acids and unsaturated fatty acids, which can be used to prevent human nutrition malabsorption syndrome, small bowel dysfunction, coronary heart disease and neonatal nutritional deficiency diseases [1,2,3]
Our results show that miR-130b express abundantly in the mammary gland of goat and is one of the miRNAs with most significantly differential expression in different periods. miR-130b has been reported to be involved in diseases, such as obesity, and lipid metabolism in adipose tissue, indicating its role in the process of lactation
We investigated the effect of elevated expression of miR-130b with miRNA mimic on milk fat synthesis in goat mammary gland epithelial cells (GMEC)
Summary
Goat milk contains a large number of short chain fatty acids and unsaturated fatty acids, which can be used to prevent human nutrition malabsorption syndrome, small bowel dysfunction, coronary heart disease and neonatal nutritional deficiency diseases [1,2,3]. In the last few decades there were rare reports about the molecular mechanism underlying this process, for which researches mainly focus on the analysis of a single gene or function verification only, lacking more comprehensive study in term of molecular regulation of milk fat metabolism [6,7,8]. Previous studies show that more than 60% of human protein-coding genes have at least one binding site of conservative miRNAs [1,19]. Growing reports indicate that miRNAs express spatiotemporal specific manner in eukaryotic organisms and play crucial role in a variety of processes such as cell apoptosis, cell proliferation, cell differentiation, fat metabolism and insulin secretion, immune regulation, emergency response, etc. There are few studies about the function and mechanism of miRNAs during the process of goat milk fat metabolism [20,21,22]
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